


A series of conversations with my boyfriend's abusive and highly traumatized stalker by Professor Molly Dawes (MD, LPC)

by binz, shiplizard



Series: Molly Dawes and the Chamber of Fuckboys [1]
Category: Forever (TV)
Genre: Bondage, D/s romance, Electricity, F/M, Forever Ficathon, Holiday Fic Exchange, Kink Negotiation, M/M, Molly Dawes and the chamber of fuckboys, Molly takes no shit, Power Dynamics, Prelude to poly but not there yet, Risk Aware Consensual Kink, Sexually Violent Dreams and Fantasies, Wildly divergent chapter lengths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 02:53:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5568049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/binz/pseuds/binz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/shiplizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An in-place catalogue study of the relationship dynamics between a domination therapist, her (immortal) boyfriend, and her boyfriend's (immortal) stalker [who is, in clinical terms, a goddamn mess]. </p><p>Or: The story of how Adam and Molly Dawes both love Henry Morgan in their own ways, the ways they love him, and the tentative truce they finally find their way to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An unpleasant introduction to my boyfriend’s etcetera etcetera

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snafutype](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snafutype/gifts).



> Preferred Relationship(s): Adam/Henry or Iona/Henry or  
> Adam/Henry/Iona
> 
> Prompt: Polyamorous Adam/Henry/Iona, relationship negotiation,  
> possibly kink negotiation if someone is up for it?? Domestic fluff or  
> first starting to date would be interesting.
> 
> Couldn't quuiite get it to the poly stage, but put in the groundwork at least! (Give it another twenty or thirty years and they could totally be there.) Hope the kink is what you were hoping for! This universe was a lot of fun to write it, so hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Happy Forever!

“How’s that?” Molly says, tugging on the strap. The bedframe doesn’t shudder, doesn’t even move. She’s not surprised; it’s solid and made to stand up to far more than the loose, soft suede cuffs she’s just hooked to it. She runs her hands down from the clips in the posts and the short, thin chains, along Henry’s long, beautiful fingers and palms, testing the wiggle room between his wrists and the cuffs as she goes. Lots of room. 

She trails a finger down one of his forearms, held suspended above his head, traces one engaged bicep. “Everything feel all right?”

Henry shivers. He looks as if he’s about to have a tooth pulled; not the state of mind she’s aiming for. “It’s fine.” 

“You’re allowed to change your mind, sweetheart.” She strokes his chest soothingly, slipping from her straddled position over his chest to sitting on the mattress beside him. “I like what we’ve been doing.” 

“I really would like to try this,” Henry says, peering up at her. “Please.” 

“All right. Remember: stop means stop. No means no.” She’s only repeating what they’ve already agreed to, but she wants to make sure he understands. Even a bit of no-frills bondage can be harrowing, and Henry’s not himself tonight. 

Two months ago he showed up with roses and promised her that he wasn’t afraid anymore. And they’ve been a great two months, Henry almost suspiciously full of sunshine-- like a weight had been lifted right off him, all smiles and dry humour and sweetly attentive. 

Tonight he showed up to their date looking like the weight had crashed back down, with interest. 

_Make me forget,_ he’d said, and she hadn’t asked about what, just sat him down to talk limits. 

“I’m going to do your feet now,” she says, and moves off the bed and down his long legs to cuff his ankles. He flinches when she nudges his knees apart. 

“I don’t think I like that,” he says, in an alarmed rush. She nudges his legs back together. 

“Can you tell me why?” she asks, soft and sweet and nonthreatening. “You don’t have to. But it will help me understand.” 

“I don’t want to feel so splayed out. So…” 

“Vulnerable?” 

“Yes, that precisely.” 

“Okay.” She strokes his calf. It’s heartbreaking how surprised he sounds. Oh, he’s no virgin, has thrown himself eagerly into her suggestions and knows a shocking amount about spanking as it turns out; but his own preferences when it comes to kink are foggy and he seems to have some old triggers that he doesn’t know about. A surprisingly careful line to walk: poor Henry. 

“You want me to make you feel safe?” she asks, and he nods eagerly. “Okay.” 

She smiles sweetly at him while she quickly goes through her options. Swaddling pops instantly to mind but that’s a bit more intensive than she wants to get tonight. There may be a compromise option, something that straddles the line between comfort and constriction.

“How do you feel about rope?” 

“I’m not philosophically opposed to it,” he says, a little puzzled. 

“I’m going to bind your legs together, sweetheart.” She pets his thigh, a soothing up and down motion until she can feel some of the tension settle. Not as much of it as she’d like, he’s still as tight as a stretched band, his muscles twitching under her hand. Ponyplay slides into her thoughts, something that might feed his needs to be useful and used and the centre of attention, and she tucks it away for later. 

“I’m going to be right back,” she tells him, “are you going to be okay here if I go to the closet?”

He nods, looking grim. She hovers an extra moment, watching to see if he’ll change his mind, then takes a few small steps away. 

He catches himself by surprise a second later when he goes to move a hand and is caught up short by the cuff. The thin, short chain clinks, the second one a moment later when he jerks his other arm-- she pauses, watches him, but the panic she’s half expecting doesn’t come. Henry gives another curious tug, then another, his dark eyes focusing, losing some of their banked misery as he tests his range of movement.

Good. Good. He’s as curious as he is sweet-natured. This could really help him tonight, give him something to lose himself in. She just has to remember to focus it down, to keep him feeling safe and bound instead of trapped.

Someone rings the front doorbell.

That’s-- odd. 

She can’t remember the last time someone came to her door unexpected. Delivery, yes. This... no. Kids, maybe. 

She glances at Henry. He’s stopped testing the limits of his restraints, hands loosely curled where they’re held up above his head, but he’s wriggling his hips and shoulders, caterpillaring himself into a sitting position against the headboard instead of laying back on the mattress. He’s put what he thinks is his stoic face on, but she can see the stress in his expression, in his damp eyes and the the way his chest has started to heave.

“I’m going to get that rope,” she tells him, smiling gently. “Is that still okay?”

He jerks a nod, a quick up-down that’s really not reassuring.

The bell rings again.

Probably not kids. 

She glances at Henry-- where is he with this? Has it thrown him out completely, should she uncuff him and switch the game plan? 

...Yes. Yes she should. The curious interest he’d been showing has disappeared, drained away like it was never there at all. 

He’s drawn his legs up to his chest best he can, curled against the headboard, his wrists bound up by his ears. He looks cold and miserable.

“I’m here,” she says, and crosses back quickly to the bed. She fetches the cuff key from the safe box in the nightstand and grabs a throw blanket from the turned down covers, pulling it up to him. As soon as one hand is free, he grabs it and draws it up to his chin. She presses a kiss to his cheek, another to his other palm as she unlocks it.

He grabs her wrist, gently, always so careful, and tucks it against his chest, leaning in for a kiss. He’s so good at it, so amazingly good at kissing, when she can think through it she always wonders where, how he got so good when--

The doorbell rings. Henry goes still against her, she can feel his muscles tense, his breathing ratchet up. 

“Were you expecting anyone?” she asks calmly, neutrally. 

He shakes his head, and she pulls backs, lets her regret come out in her voice. “I should get that. Maybe someone’s lost.” She tightens her robe, smiles softly. He’s such a sweet man, but something’s rattled him deep tonight. She needs to calm him down. “When I get back, let’s do something nice.”

She grabs her phone and switches it to the emergency dial screen, ready to dial out with a tap. Just in case. “Hold this for me,” she says, and takes the extra moment to show him the screen. “If you need to, tap that green phone right there, you see? It will call 911. If the lock screen goes on, the code is 2369, you understand? Then tap emergency down in the corner, then the green button. Does that make sense?” 

He nods, jerkily, sudden concern on his face. He doesn’t use cell phones often, and as off-kilter as he is tonight, she’s obviously surprised him by mentioning the police. Men. But he _works_ for the police. He doesn’t argue, though, just cradles the phone carefully, and looks around. 

“Where are--”

“Left of the bed,” she says, and presses a quick kiss to his lips. “Hopefully I’m back before you’ve got your trousers on.”

The bell rings again as she crosses into the living room. The back of her neck starts to prickle. “Henry,” she calls back, voice low, into the bedroom. “Why don’t you come out here too. Bring my phone.”

She hears the bed creak, and starts forward again, taking a deep calming breath as she goes. There’s someone standing on the step, she can see the dark blur of their outline through the opaque glass. It’s only 8 pm; not that late. But she can’t think of any reason why someone would try the bell again and again. An accident, maybe. But why not try the other doors? The wrong address-- but to keep trying?

She checks that the chain is secured-- yes, good-- and gets behind the door, easing it open less than even the chain allows. Nothing happens. 

She’s probably being foolish.

She smiles politely, and peers through the open crack. “Hello?”

“Hello, Doctor Dawes,” says the man standing on her front step. “I’m here for Henry.”

He’s white, late-30s to mid-40s, brown eyes, brown hair, she starts cataloguing. 5’11, maybe a bit less without the newsboy cap pulled low over his forehead. “I’m sorry, have we met?” 

“No,” he smiles blandly. Bland is a good word. There’s nothing about him that jumps out, his features not unattractive but aggressively nondescriptive. She can feel her heart starting to pound, a shaky jolt of adrenalin working its way through her system. She presses her fingers to the door to make sure they don’t shake on her. “But Henry knows exactly who I am. You could say... I’m his other half.”

Stalker. Molly realises in an instant. Possible ex-boyfriend. Absolutely possessive. Very probably dangerous. If he’d made contact today, no wonder Henry was so rattled.

She hears Henry come into the living room, hears his footsteps behind her making their way across the hardwood, hears the falter and his quick, sharp breath when he sees who’s peering through the crack in the door.

“Adam,” he says, voice dry and pulling from somewhere painful. 

“Hello, Henry.” She sees Adam’s eyes gleam as Henry comes into his view, the flashes of-- what? Hunger. Fear. Anger. Want. 

“Henry,” Molly says firmly. “Go call the police, please.” She needs them away from each other, right now, but she needs Henry in shouting distance for her own comfort. 

“The police, Henry?” Adam croons, taunting. She can feel Henry still behind her, but doesn’t turn to look at him. She has the door between her and Adam, she needs to keep him talking, keep him distracted until it’s too late for him to run. “You’re going to bring them into this? Perhaps I was wrong before-- perhaps you don’t fear your secret getting out.”

Ugh, classic stalker behaviour. Vague threats and plying on the victim's shame for being in such a bad situation in the first place. Poor Henry.

“Let me know when they’re on their way, Henry,” she says.

“Whatever happened with Jo, Henry?” Adam asks, stepping closer to the door. Molly resists the urge to slam it. Keep him busy. The cops are coming. “Your precious Detective Martinez. Did you tell her, or did you lie to her? What does she see when she looks at you now? 

“You see, Doctor Dawes,” and like that his attention has shifted back to her. It’s electric, off-putting, too much and too little at the same time. “Henry and I share a very obscure condition. Only two cases in the world.”

Henry takes a fast, painful sounding breath behind her. He hasn’t started to speak yet, the line must still be ringing. Friday night, Memorial Day weekend. It could be awhile. 

Adam slants his mouth. It’s thin, sharp. “We both find it impossible to die. Henry’s story begins in the early nineteenth century. My own is... longer.”

“You came here tonight to tell me this?” She asks it professionally calmly. Dangerous, delusional. Keep him talking. Keep him focused on her, not on Henry. 

“Not in and of itself, no.” He holds her gaze for a long moment; classic dominance tactic. She stares back, nonthreatening, not threatened. “But I thought you deserved the courtesy of an explanation. It only seems fair that you know why you will never be what he needs. Why you will wither and die but he and I are eternal.“

She could play ex-boyfriend bingo with this one. Poor Henry. ...How long as he been on the phone, now? She knows the dispatch can get busy, but how is it taking _this_ long?

She risks turning to look back behind her-- Henry is standing just off to her side, in full view of the door, her phone in his hands. The screen is dark. Is he done? She knows they like to keep you on the phone until the police arrive, would they have-- No. No, she never heard him speaking. He hasn’t called at all. 

Her stomach goes cold. She should have checked in sooner. It’s not his fault; she doesn’t know their history, doesn’t know how much sway Adam’s threats have over him. 

“Henry,” she says, reaching out. “Give me the phone. Come on, Henry.”

She glances back to the door and freezes in shock, because Adam’s holding a blade-- an old fashioned straight razor gleaming in her porch light. He’s out of her reach but he could lunge forward without warning. She takes a fast step back, another, smacks into Henry with her still out-reached hand. He catches her by it, stops her from tumbling.

He’s still clinging to her arm when Adam lifts the blade to his own neck, and then she’s fumbling for the safety chain with her free hand and she’s still looking into Adam’s eyes when he slices across his own throat, spraying her with arterial blood. 

She shrieks, jerking back and then forward to rip the safety chain open. 

“Molly, please don’t, Molly, no--” 

She pulls out of Henry’s grasp and lunges forward. There’s blood pooling on the stoop, she can feel it running down her face, there’s no first aid for a wound like that, but she has to try, if she stops it, if she presses the slit ends back together-- 

She grabs Adam’s shoulder, hears the awful burble of aspirated blood, and then her hand clenches around nothing and she overbalances and crashes to her knees on the dry, bloodless stoop. 

He’s gone. He’s gone. She pats at the step, stupidly, like Adam’s body is a lost contact. It’s dry and cold. There’s no blood. No body. 

She looks back to see if Henry’s seeing the same thing she is and sees that he’s frozen, phone in one hand, the other still extended to pull her back. His face is twisted up with misery, and when he moves it’s only to shrink back from her and drop his gaze. 

Numbly, she steps back inside, and shuts the door. She turns the deadbolt and the secondary lock, and slides the safety chain back into place. Her hands are shaking; they make the chain rattle and she misses the groove on the first try, needs to time her second go to her breathing. 

“He was here?” she asks, when she’s calm enough to speak, when she can grasp at the empty swirling place where her thoughts should be and pull something out. 

Henry hunches his shoulders, looking away from her, ruining the line of his half-buttoned shirt as he fumbles with the buttons. He’s going to go, she realises. He’s going to grab his shoes and slip out the door and out of her life, leaving her with-- with this. With the memory of man bleeding out and dying and disappearing under her hands. 

“Henry,” she says, sharply enough to make him jerk and look up, “was there a man on the front stoop?” 

“Molly,” he says. “What you think you’ve seen-- I--” 

“Henry,” she says, sternly, and puts her hands firmly on his shoulders. He’s gone so pale, clammy with sweat. “Henry, whatever just happened, it isn’t your fault. It’s going to be all right. I just need to know what happened.” 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I couldn’t call the police. I was afraid. I’ve put you in danger. I’m sorry.” 

It’s true, she realizes. Or Henry believes it is, but if it’s possible for-- whatever just happened to happen, it’s possible that there’s so much more to this than delusion. She has to think fast, lean on her training and her instinct, because Henry is on a horrible edge right now. He’s shivering, breathing too shallowly-- she’d have to be unconscious not to recognize it as a panic attack. 

“He called it a condition,” she says slowly, and Henry flinches. 

“It’s as good a term as any.” He sounds so defeated, so small. 

“How long has he been holding this over your head? Oh, Henry.” She lifts her hands to his face. His cheeks are so cold. “He had no right to tell me that. He had no right. I’m not angry at you, sweetheart.” 

“I’m more than two hundred years old, Molly. I’m everything he said. I’ve been lying to you, to everyone--” 

“You must have been so scared.” 

He makes a strangled noise, pulls in one gasping breath, and lets it out in a sob. It breaks a dam inside of him-- he crumples against her, sliding down to his knees with his face pressed into her stomach, and the sobs come louder and harder until she thinks they’ll shake him apart. 

She’s seen Henry be so fearless, so strong and capable-- he saved her life, he’s faced torture and been able to laugh about it after the fact, and tonight a man showed up and cracked him open with a few words. 

Adam’s immortality is novel, but the stalking, the disgusting power plays, the textbook attempt to isolate Henry from anyone who could support him? She’s seen this all before. It doesn’t scare her or shock her or shake her. It just makes her very, very angry. 

If Adam thinks she’s going to put up with this bullshit, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.


	2. A short conversation with etcetera

She opens the door to her office to invite her 2 o’clock intake appointment in and Adam is sitting in the little front entry room. 

He smiles benignly at her. 

She smiles back, brittle only in the way that diamonds are brittle. “‘Andrew Fromme’?” 

The mid-June sun turns the neutral colours of her waiting room into warm gold, like a roadtrip landscape flashing by on summer vacation. It blankets Adam in half light, his loose jacket and newsboy cap throwing shadows. He looks almost contrite when he nods, as if invading her office under an alias is just a prank gone wrong and terrorizing Henry has all been a misunderstanding. 

“What do you want?” 

“I want the same thing all of your clients want, Professor Dawes.” He spreads his hands, expression innocent. “I want you to hurt me.” 

“I’m not a dominatrix. I’m a domination therapist. My end goal is improved mental health, not sexual gratification. I’d refer you to someone, if I didn’t consider you an unacceptable risk.” 

Now he pretends to be wounded; big dark eyes and a slight pout. “Jealousy is an ugly thing, Professor Dawes.” 

“So is abuse.” Her smile glitters. Her cheeks are going to cramp soon. “So is violating Henry’s privacy.” 

“I only told you the truth.” His wan face creases in an unpleasant smirk.

“It wasn’t your truth to tell. You tried to sabotage his relationships and sense of security by revealing a very sensitive medical issue,” she clarifies. “You wanted to scare him. You want to control him by isolating him. That’s not unique. It isn’t even surprising.” 

“I spent decades practicing as a psychotherapist. I know all the manuals you’re quoting, and frankly I’m a little offended. Try harder, Professor Dawes.” His smirk twists into a bored frown. 

“You first.” Her mouth goes into a flat line, and the relief to her tight facial muscles is immense. Her professional smile has never been such a strain before. “Be less of a cliche and I’ll stop quoting crisis line pamphlets at you.” 

“You have no idea what my life has been--” 

“I know what you’ve done to Henry. And what he’s done to you. As a mental health professional, what about this situation makes you think this could be a healthy therapeutic relationship?” 

“Touche.” He bares his teeth. It may be a smile, but she’s not at all certain. 

“We’re done here, ‘Mister Fromme.’ Have a good day.” 

He considers her for a while, comes to… some decision, tips his newsboy hat at her, and leaves. 

She had forty five minutes scheduled for the Fromme intake appointment, and it hasn’t been more than fifteen. That gives her a free half hour to scrub the cold sweat off of her face and arms and slowly come down from the adrenaline high. 

Well. That’s not over with, obviously. She’ll call Henry after her last appointment and let him know what happened-- no, better do that now, just in case Adam decides to make a point. 

She wants a shower, but there isn’t quite time. Damn. Nothing to do but get her game face on and recenter and get on with the day.


	3. A case study in breathlessness

Molly sips at her wine, forcing herself to slowly swallow and set the glass down on the table beside her. She keeps her movements steady, easy, relaxed. Not that Henry can see her, but he’s so observant. He’ll be able to tell if she’s anything but nonchalant. 

“Henry,” she says. “Come here.”

He makes a valiant effort to turn, and manages to shuffle a few steps before he gives up and sinks carefully to his knees. 

She dimples at the picture he makes; neat lines of pink bondage tape interspersed with black wrap him from mid-thigh to mid-calf, giving him a candy colored mermaid tail. She’d love to take the theme a bit further sometime-- change out his plain white briefs for a pink thong or some black lace panties, say, pop in a decorative plug, and strap a pretty little harness over his bare chest. 

He’s adorable just as he is, though. The tape is loose enough to give him mobility at the ankles and allow some bend in his knees, but he can’t walk or kneel properly-- she’d been prepared for it to be a bit too far but he’s overjoyed with it, and he comes crawling lithely across the floor to her with a twinkle in his eyes, rolling his bottom side to side as he prowls forward on his arms and drags his immobilized legs behind him. 

“Yes, Miss?” he says, ever so innocent, propping his chin on her knee. 

“Did you do a good job alphabetizing my books?” 

“That’s for you to say, Miss. I hope I’ve pleased you.” 

He’s being just a little mischievous; there’s a streak of submission but it’s mixed strongly with a sense of play. Instead of being irritated or disappointed the first time she experimented with having him perform chores in bondage, he was delighted-- thought it was a bit absurd but seemed to enjoy being useful, and once he realized that she liked the way he looked in bondage he started to strut like a peacock. 

Or crawl like one, as the case may be.

He loves to please and he loves to be pretty, and he’s so, so darling. 

“I’ll be checking your work later,” she promises, injecting a drop of menace into it, and he makes a little face of faux-apprehension that melts back into a smile. 

They’re playing within a wide, safe range tonight-- hand discipline only, no hard implements, no edging or torture or full body restraint. It’s more like a date with props than a scene, except that she is in charge in a very definite way, and while Henry’s free to engage in a little schoolboy disobedience, she knows that when she commands he will obey. 

Because she had suggested the tape and introduced the range of possible toys; he’d been delighted but left that all in her hands. He’d only asked for one thing. He’d wanted to feel safe, and he’d wanted her to have control over him. 

She lifts her skirt up, shows him her lack of panties. 

“Now I have a new job for you,” she purrs, and his smile becomes predatory. 

“Oh, _yes_ , Miss.” He leans in, and then pauses, looking up at her and waiting for a sign. 

She waits a few beats-- two, three, four-- and then nods. “Good boy for waiting. Eat up.” 

She doesn’t make it too easy for him; he has to balance on the central point of his half-bent knees and anchor himself with his hands as he roots under her skirt. Every so often she pushes him off balance with a casual knee and feels him gasp against her thigh or into her crotch, watches the muscles of his arms flex as he rights himself. 

She can see the tent growing in his briefs, erection poking insistently at the white cotton-- more insistent every time she reminds him how at her mercy he is. 

He’s good-- ooh, he’s good, nuzzles her clitoris and licks his way down her labia and kisses back up, nibbles, sucks gently. It’s such a temptation to just let him stay there, but she has plans. 

She gives him a particularly hard shove and follows through with a slow sweep of the leg, toppling him in onto his side in a flailing, slow motion collapse. He doesn’t quite stick the landing, and there’s a distinct thump as he hits the ground. 

She rests her high-heeled foot on his chest, putting just the breath of a threat of weight on the stiletto heel. “Problem?” she asks sweetly. 

“No, Miss,” he breathes, looking up at her adoringly. 

Her heart swells. What a perfect boy. 

“Well? Get back up,” she says, sternly, leaning back in her seat as if she isn’t melting with equal adoration on the inside. 

His erection swings inside his brief as he pulls himself back up and under her skirt, performing an absurd little waggle, and she touches it gently with the pointed toe of her shoe. “I hope you don’t expect me to do anything about this ridiculous display.” 

He shakes his head fervently-- which drags his nose across her clit in a very intriguing way-- and it’s a very good thing his face is under her skirt and he can’t see her eyes cross. 

“Good boy.” 

She lets him take her to two orgasms, and him to a grand total of none, before she moves them to bed-- it’s harder for him to crawl now with his erection in the way, and he’s obviously feeling something rather interesting as he drags his lower body onto the carpeted floor of her room. 

She’s interested to see how he’ll tackle getting onto her bed, and he solves it very quickly, rolling onto his back and then hauling himself up hand over hand on one of the railings until he’s managed to stand up again. 

“What now, Miss?” he pants. 

“Face down,” she coos, and he flops down and wiggles gracelessly into the rough center of the bed. His hips immediately start to roll against the mattress. “Did I say you could do that?” 

“No, Miss,” he says, resigned. 

“Ask nicely if you can hump the bed.” 

His nostrils flare; his eyes flick side to side and she wonders if this is the first time tonight he’s really feel the sting of any humiliation. She watches carefully, only mentally relaxes when he lowers his eyes and looks out at her through the lashes. “Please, Miss,” he rumbles. “May I hump the bed?” 

“Mm. You may, but not yet.” She had a ball gag set out on her night stand for just such an occasion, and he watches but says nothing as she retrieves it now. No surprise on his face-- he’s incredibly observant, he must have seen it when he was standing up and known it was for him. “I’m done with your mouth for now. Open up.” 

He does, so obedient she could kiss him (later), and she wiggles it firmly in and buckles it behind his head. “Good?” 

He nods eagerly. 

“Right. Now face down. I’m going to see what’s wrapped up in those plain little briefs of yours, and I want you to be a good boy and keep your hands to yourself. And above your waist. You can hump now,” she adds as an afterthought, grinning as he instantly starts to roll his hips against the bed. “But you’re not going to come. Not until we get to the spanking. Are you, sweetheart?” 

A fervent headshake. 

She grins, and settles in to play. They’ve got all night, after all, and he’s got such a pretty, pretty ass. She won’t be able to plug or finger him with his legs locked shut like this, but there’s still so much to bite, and grab and tease and kiss and play with. 

She drags the white briefs down to crumple around his legs just above where the tape starts and sighs softly. It really is a glorious sight. It’s going to be even prettier with fingernail scratches on it. 

He makes a contented sound as she grabs two handfuls for size-- is all the fat in his body back here? Goodness. Lovely to the touch. A bit furry; she wonders if he’d be up for a shaving. She starts to scrape, leans in for a little nip that makes him yelp and lift his hips back up for another. 

She hasn’t progressed beyond a little scratching and one or two light smacks when it happens. He goes rigid, suddenly and without warning, and his breathing changes-- low and slow to jerky grunts. She recognizes the reaction, and his sudden clawing at the gag gives her at least a hint as to what’s caused it, and she immediately unbuckles the gag, trying to be careful with his hair, trying not to tug it in tighter.

“Got it. We’re stopping now, Henry. Are you with me, Henry?” Her own arousal is forgotten: Henry is her first priority. Her mind is racing-- what caused this? Did she miss a warning? She’s almost sure she didn’t, but almost isn’t enough. 

Is the gag the only thing distressing him? She has to make him comfortable oh goddammit she left the safety scissors in the living room what a rookie mistake-!

He spits out the gag and takes a few deep breaths, grabbing her hand when she tries to turn him over. 

“Henry?” 

His breathing slows, and he lets out a sigh, releasing her hand. 

Then, so sudden it makes her jump, he punches a fist into the bed. “Damn. Damn, damn, _damn._ ”

“Henry!” she snaps, relief making her short-tempered. “Turn over and talk to me.” 

He rolls over, showing her a scowl that droops into a disgusted frown. He’s still half hard, skin color healthy-- whatever it is has faded away as quickly as it came. “Oh, Molly, I’m so sorry--” 

“No apologies. Are you okay? ” 

“I know. I know, it was so -- how utterly ridiculous,” he berates himself, his hand fisting again and then dropping impotently at his side. “It was wonderful, everything you were doing was bliss, and of all things-- my face was pressed down and my nose started to run. For a moment I thought I couldn’t breathe. How absurd, I was perfectly safe, I could breathe around the gag, but for a moment-- stupid, how damned stupid!” 

“Stop that,” she says firmly, and he does. “You agreed to some rules tonight, remember? What was rule number one.” 

“Ah...” he casts around in his memory, and she knows the second he remembers, because he scowls again. “But--” 

“What was rule number one?” 

He grumbles and ducks her gaze, and she waits for him to get past his self-recrimination and mutter: “There are no wrong reactions.” 

“And does that include yours?” 

“Yes.” 

She gives him a prompting look. “And that means?” 

“My reactions are not wrong,” he says dutifully. “But--” 

“Nope.” 

He sulks about that for a second or two, but can’t keep it up when she starts to stroke his shoulder. 

“You don’t have to talk about it.” She stops petting his shoulder to pick up the gag, dangling it over a finger. “Can you tell me if it was specifically being unable to breathe or if having anything in your mouth will be a problem?” 

“Oh-- no, definitely the breathing. My mouth was clear when--” he pauses. “No, there’s no reason not to tell you. Hiding my past is such an ingrained habit it becomes difficult to remember to be honest with anyone who actually knows the truth.” He ducks his gaze for a moment, then peers back up through his wet lashes. Her heart clenches. “It’s not a very complicated story.” 

He looks uncomfortable, but not anywhere near panic. Sad, mostly. “I … my first wife did not take news of my immortality well. I had died for the first time a few months before, and I realize I must not have sounded like a sane man-- I was so fervent, so caught up in my own shock. It must have terrified her. She had me committed to psychiatric care.” 

Molly frowns. Psychiatric care in the early nineteenth century was neither caring nor particularly effective psychiatry. 

“I was subject to a hydrotherapeutic immersion treatment. Among others. Which is to say.” 

“Which is to say they held your head underwater,” she finishes, trying to keep her horror off her face. Oh, her poor Henry!

“I was restrained and I couldn’t breathe, and from time to time when I find myself in a similar situation, I -- remember that time. Very clearly.” 

“And you don’t think it’s reasonable to have that kind of reaction to being tortured?” 

“It wasn’t torture. It wasn’t even fatal. It was a misguided attempt at therapy, a mistake, that’s all.” 

“Yes, and bloodletting was considered medicinal, but that doesn’t make it any less harmful!” 

“Or pleasant,” Henry says with a little shudder, and she realizes that it was still a valid treatment up through most of the nineteenth century-- Henry has probably been bled at some point in his life.

“Henry, I may not have lived through it, but I’ve researched all the blind alleys and abusive practices that have been called ‘therapy’ over the last three centuries. I could write the book. If you count peer reviewed papers, I have written the book.” 

“You have?” Henry rolls awkwardly onto his side, propping himself on his elbows, his sudden look of serious academic curiosity so at odds with his dangling half-hard penis draped over his stomach and his bondage-taped legs that Molly has to bite down hard on a giggle. “Can I read it?” 

“Yes. But not right now. And if you’re trying to distract me from what just happened, it’s not going to work.” 

“Ah, well. I had to try. It’s just-- embarrassing. And brought on by a very unhappy chapter in my past.” 

“Henry, having a reaction like that to trauma in your past, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.” She tugs him against her; he tips into her chest and nuzzles close. 

“I know. I know that. But sometimes it’s hard to believe.“

“You worry about turning into him, don’t you?” she murmurs, stroking his hair. “But this is the farthest thing from that. Memories leave a mark. That’s fundamentally human.” 

He lets out a soft sigh, and she feels him relaxing. 

“I really do want to read your papers,” he murmurs into her breast. 

“Now I’m nervous,” she teases, keeping up her soothing caresses. “I’ve never met someone with first hand experience in nineteenth century psychiatric techniques before; what if I got it all wrong?” 

“I promise not to tell you if you’ve made any mistakes.” 

“Henry Morgan, don’t you dare.” She kisses his sweat damp hair. “If you read my paper I want a full suite of corrections and reactions in red pen.” 

“...I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist saying something anyway,” he chuckles, and presses kiss to her nipple in return. 

She giggles and kisses him again-- and again, nuzzling him until he lifts his face to hers, and he moves against her. She can feel his interest coming back. Ooh, and hers was only waiting in the wings, there it is, carried along on his deep voice and his laughter, the sharp scent of his sweat. 

“Want to try again?” she asks. 

“Can we go on?” he asks, curious and hopeful. 

“Yes.” She kisses his head and pushes him back, turning away for long enough to rummage in the nightstand for-- “Ahah.” 

Henry eyes the rubber ring gag she pulls out with interest, but then she sees him understand why she’s selected this alternative in particular. “Of course-- completely unrestricted breathing.” 

“It’ll be a little more messy, but you don’t mind that, do you, sweetheart?” 

“Not in the slightest,” he says, grinning lopsidedly. “Oh, Molly, you are one of the most resourceful, wonderful women I’ve ever encountered. 

“I know,” she says with a wink, and topples him onto his back to kiss him senseless for being such a sweetheart, until he’s wriggling and hard again, and she can slip the gag into his yielding mouth and start their evening again.


	4. Another short and badly timed conversation

The phone on her nightstand has been buzzing a while by the time she finally realizes it isn’t part of a dream. She gets emergency calls rarely, but not never, and the last time she got a call in the middle of the night it was one of her students in the middle of an anxiety attack so bad the poor boy had had to be hospitalized for a few days. 

Even at its darkest setting her phone’s screen is bright enough to make her eyes water; it’s either two or three in the morning, but she can’t tell which, let alone read the number on screen. 

“Hello?” 

“Hello, Molly,” Adam growls. 

She answers him with a heartfelt groan and rolls over onto the phone, pressing her face into the pillow. 

A moment later she fishes the phone out of her cleavage and lifts it to her ear. 

“Do you need something?” she asks, muffled by the pillow. 

“I woke up from a nightmare about him, Professor Dawes. Your innocent paramour. Do you know what he did to me?” 

“Mm-hmm.” Paralysis. Air embolism. Henry told her and she’s already had this emotional crisis and moved on to generalized despair at what a sad emotional disaster Henry is. 

“He’s invaded my memories. I dream of the camps. I feel his lips on my jaw and my ear as Mengele cracks my chest open; I feel his fingertips stroking my exposed heart. I woke up in a cold sweat and I didn’t know if I wanted to scream or kiss him. Do you know how terrifying he can be, your precious Henry? I want to feel his trachea crush in my grip. I want him to hurt me, I want him to fuck me--” 

“Adam, it’s three in the morning. Go to bed.” Look, it isn’t that she’s not disturbed; she’s even sympathetic but she’s just too tired to be really upset. 

“I can’t,” he snarls. “I can’t face sleep again.” 

“Do you have any herbal tea?” 

She has to pull the phone away from her ear: his laughter is shrill and panicky. 

“You think this can be fixed with tea?” 

She rolls onto her side and plops the phone onto the side of her face so that she can mostly hear and mostly be heard, and lets the rest of her body go limp. Pillow so soft. Eyes very heavy. “I didn’t ask for your commentary. I asked if you had tea.” 

“If you think you can--” 

“Yes or no answer or I hang up. If you want my help getting back to sleep, you have to meet me halfway.” 

“I don’t want your help. I want you to understand what he does to me.” 

“Yes. Or. No.” She yawns hugely. 

“Yes,” he grumbles. 

“Good. Get up and make some tea. Take the phone.” 

“ _Really,_ this is the state of the mental health profession.” 

“Make some tea. Tell me when you have a kettle out.” 

He snarls at her, mutters insults that are either not in English or she’s just too tired, but eventually he breaks off his profane white-noise to mockingly tell her that he has an electric kettle out.

“Describe the kettle for me. ...Good. Fill it with water. Tell me how many cups you put in. Good. Start it heating. Get the tea. Is it in a tin or a box? ...describe the tin.” 

“I know what you’re doing,” he says, bad naturedly. 

“Good. Is the water hot yet?”

She’s starting to lose coherency but somehow she manages to limp through the rest of the routine, ordering him to count slow, deep breaths between drinks of tea. 

“Now go back to bed,” she mumbles, and he hisses something at her and then goes silent. 

With a huge effort-- her arm feels like lead-- she picks up the phone and cracks one gummy eye open far enough to see that he’s hung up. 

She jams the phone under her pillow and throws the blankets over her face with the last of her energy. Inconsiderate immortal bastard work in the morni n g g z z z


	5. A shocking development

Their dates have taken a rhythm: Henry cooks a lovely dinner and cleans up after; Molly puts on some low key piano music and waits on the couch with a small glass of wine for him to approach, eyes sparkling, and he waits for her to pat the sofa so that he can take a seat by her. 

He likes that little bit of domestic submission, they’ve already talked through that. He says it makes him feel useful. She’s kept him standing there for up to two minutes, watching his eager, longing face, and the glow of happiness when she finally relents is completely unfeigned. 

Not tonight, though. Tonight is simple and cuddly, and she doesn’t keep him waiting a second. He’s sitting close beside her, his socked foot rubbing her stockinged one. 

“You were going to use a cattle prod on me, at our first meeting,” he murmurs. “I think I’d rather like it if you did.” 

She puts down her glass of wine. She’s going to need to stay sober. Instead she turns to him, stroking the curly hair back from his ear and feeling it spring back into place across her fingertips. 

“Even after what happened?” 

She hadn’t been actually going to shock him, the first time, she’s not that unprofessional or pushy. She’d wanted him to feel the anticipation, built up carefully, and experience the sudden drop when she pressed the inactive leads against him-- to show him what it could feel like to actually want pain, what it could be for her clients. It’s hard to explain why people come to her; easier sometimes to show, especially with a curious, analytical mind like Henry’s.

And, if she’s being honest, she’d wanted to see if it intrigued him enough to play outside the office. 

But it hadn’t turned out that way. She’s been arrested and Henry had been kidnapped by an obsessive ex-client and felt the shock rod in the hands of someone extremely unprofessional and uncaring and if the police had been too late-- 

She swallows and takes a short breath and Henry’s face falls. 

“Oh, Molly. I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and lifts his hand to cover hers. “Those memories must be so unpleasant for you.”

“Henry, I don’t want to make you feel unsafe.” 

“Darling, you never do. Even when I’m frightened of the toys, I never lose trust in you.” He leans his cheek into their combined touch. 

Sweet boy. She smiles warmly at him, and strokes his cheek with her thumb before slowly pulling back. 

“If you don’t want to--” he starts, misunderstanding, and she smiles fondly at him and shakes her head. 

“That kind of play can’t ever be completely safe. I know what I’m doing, but there are risks involved, sweetheart. The kind of risks we need to talk about with clear heads, all right?” 

He dips his head in acknowledgement. 

She aches to reach out and lift his chin, see his sweet compliant smile, but she needs him to recenter and not focus too much on her if they’re going to have this discussion. 

“I’m taking heavy electrical play off the table for tonight. But there are lighter things-- you liked the TENS unit.” 

“I adored the TENS unit,” Henry says, with feeling. 

“Do you want a little more pain with your pleasure? There are higher settings we can play with.” 

“It isn’t the pain, precisely.” He frowns as he thinks, a little deepening of the line in forehead as he carefully puts his thoughts into words. She wants to touch it, to stroke down its length, but she won’t distract him while he’s concentrating. "That’s not unwelcome but it’s secondary. It’s feeling my body react without my control-- convulsion, involuntary motion. It’s terrifying. It’s…” 

Freeing? she wonders. 

“I want that,” he finishes. “I know it hurts. I remember. But-- you hurt me but never harm me.” 

“Oh, Henry.” Oh, her sweet boy. He wants so much and doesn’t even know how to ask for some of it and she’s got to be so careful with him. “We’ll try the shock rod. Later, when we haven’t had wine with dinner. You’re going to have to listen to me.” 

“Gladly,” he breathes. 

“Even when you don’t like it,” she murmurs. “I have limits, too. You may want more when I feel it’s not safe to give it to you. You may want to feel it in places that are dangerous.” 

“Molly… you can’t kill me. The worst that could happen is only a temporary setback. We could do anything--” 

“No, Henry. Not we can’t. Won’t. I won’t kill you. I won’t. That’s my limit.” She has a sudden clear picture of Henry just-- stopping, too much voltage too close to the heart, and vanishing under her hands like Adam had vanished, and suddenly tears are prickling in her eyes. 

Henry draws in a deep breath, coming out of his own fantasies and back to the present, and moves forward. She doesn’t pull back as he wraps his arms around her, kissing the stray tears that have run over onto his cheeks. 

“I understand. I’m sorry, Molly. I’m sorry, I should have understood. I will. I’ll protect your heart as you do mine. I will not make you feel unsafe.” 

He cradles her in his arms until her shoulders untense and the stinging in her eyes washes away.

She murmurs instructions into his ear and he lifts her gently from the couch, carries her in a princess hold to sit her lightly on the bed, and curls into her lap. She kisses his hair and strokes it, caressing his back and half-seeing a long, lean sighthound, loyal and loving and innocent. 

Later, when warm relief has turned back into desire, she undresses him and cuffs him to the bed again, carefully applying the pads of the TENS unit to his left hand, pressing one onto the meaty side of his hand under his pinky, the other wrapped carefully around his long index finger. She toys with the dials as he sighs happily, slowly increasing the current until his fingers twitch ever so slightly. 

He watches them with fascination, licking his lips, and as she draws a line down his forearm to the crease of his elbow he flinches away. He’s starting to shift his hips slightly. 

When she leans over to suck on the forefinger of his other hand, he grunts, and the shift of his hips turns into a rhythmic roll as he thrusts against nothing but the weight of a sheet, groaning with frustration and desire. 

She runs her tongue across his fingerprints, clenching her thighs tight and savouring his pleasure. His eyes are fixed on the faint tremors of his hand, and the fingers in her mouth twitch in sympathy-- she’s barely touched him below the neck, let alone below the waist, and the tent in the sheet is only growing as his helplessness arouses him more and more. 

“Little higher,” she mutters against his palm, and raises the intensity slowly up again. 

He gasps, sharply, as the tingling feeling in his hand becomes a pinch. 

“Stop, please,” he gasps. “Green. Please, it hurts.” 

She nudges it up a little higher, watches pain and pleasure chase over his face, and then slowly starts to switch it down.

“No,” he moans, when she turns off the machine and peels the sticky pads away. “No, Molly, please. Please, more, please--” 

He’s sweating and beautiful and warm and heaving under her, and it’s a challenge to do anything but straddle him and grind against his beautiful erection, but she wants something particular, something special for them tonight-- she disconnects the adhesive pads from the TENS, dives into the bottom drawer of her nightstand, and comes out with one of her favourite things. And gloves, and condom, and lubricant-- she makes herself think clearly because it will be so much fun if she doesn’t have to worry about them in a few minutes. She sets the condom and the gloves and the lubricant on the side table. 

She lifts the silver plug up so that he can see it. His eyes trace down to the leads trailing out of the base, and his lips part. 

“One electrode is here,” she says, touching a point on the bulbous plug. “And one is here.” She taps the flared base. “How do you think that’s going to feel?” 

His only answer is to drop his head back and spread his legs. 

“My sweet good boy,” she croons, nudging his knees up so that his feet are flat on the bed, and gives him a little slap on the side of one round buttock to make him engage his muscles so that she can get a pillow under the base of the spine. “Now relax. Mmm, that gluteus is still tight--” she gives a little pinch and he tenses more, before obediently relaxing his weight back onto the pillow. 

She gives herself just a second to admire him, hips up, presenting himself, erection hanging over his stomach, before she tears into the condom and rolls it daintily over him. 

He humps up into her hands, but she’s something of an expert at denying pleasure, and she gives him nothing-- just light fingertips and slowly unrolling latex and done, and she’s turned away to put gloves on and lube the probe before he’s quite realized that the touching has stopped. 

“Bear down,” she coos, nuzzling the rounded tip of the plug against him. 

He does, beautifully, and the plug slides into him as smooth and easy as a diver into water. He gives a happy little grunt, pressing down against her hand like he can make it go that much deeper, and she delights in the little pinch she gives his perineum in return. He’s such a darling man.

“You’ve done that before, haven’t you, sweetheart? You like having things up there.” 

“Yes. Oh, yes, I do,” he admits without an ounce of shame, spreading his legs a little wider. 

“But you’ve never had something quite like this, have you?” She checks the connection between the TENS unit and the plugs, finds it all to her satisfaction, and turns it on. At the first flicker of sensation Henry shivers, pushing back. 

“That feels-! How strange.” 

“Mmm, isn’t it? Just the tiniest tingle? There’s more where that came from.” 

She makes a show of fussing over the machine. “Let’s see. It’s a sensitive area. We’ll take it slowly. One… setting… at a time.” She notches the dial forward once. She knows this unit inside and out. It’s tantalizing, how slow the build is. 

Henry squirms, chasing more sensation that just isn’t quite there with little thrusts of his hips. His erection bounces against his stomach, leaving little gleaming dots of lubricant from the condom behind. 

“You’re leaking on yourself, sweetheart.” She ups the intensity again, trying to be subtle as she clenches her thighs together. He looks so amazingly edible, and for his sake she can take this slowly. As much as she’d rather get right to the meat of things.

“One more?” 

“Molly, please,” he begs, straining in his cuffs. “Please, no more torture.” 

“No more?” she asks innocently. 

“Please turn it up! Please-- oh, it’s so close, it’s not enough, it feel as if it’s moving. Oh. Oh, just a bit more.” 

“That’s not the plug moving. That’s your muscles, sweetheart. Can you feel the contractions? The sphincter engaging. Mmm, that involuntary little… clench. Your body just.” And up a setting. “Can’t.” And up two. “Help it.” And up to the final intensity, that low frequency high powered pulse. 

“Oh my god.” 

“Hand in there, sweetie. You’re not going to like what happens if you come before I’m ready.” 

She climbs out of bed, snapping the gloves off and discarding them. She turns away so that he can’t see her look of strain as she strips-- she just doesn’t have the willpower to make a good show of it. She barely has enough to hang her blouse over a chair, and the skirt isn’t going to wrinkle so it can just hit the ground along with her panties. 

Henry whines. It’s a pitiful sound, the sound of a starving man denied a meal. 

She steps out of her heels, leaving them in the circle of her spread skirt, and the stockings and bra can just stay on, because she needs her sweet little sex toy in her right now. 

Coy face on, she peeks over her shoulder. Henry meets her gaze, hot and needy.

She gives herself a second to look at him-- his toes are curling in sympathy with the muscles of his rectum, his long legs are tensed, he’s sweating and licking his lips compulsively and hard enough to pound nails and already wrapped up for her pleasure. 

“Such a good boy,” she coos, and straddles him. She’s more than ready, and already wet enough that the lubricated condom is just a redundancy-- as she guides him into her and sinks down the relief is just-- her eyes flutter shut and she settles slowly down to the hilt, leaning forward so that she can grind her clit against his pubic bone. 

“I can’t hold on. I need to touch you.” 

“Yes you can, and no you don’t,” she says. “You can wait, can’t you, sweetheart? You can wait until I get there. Hold still for me.” 

He hisses-- his head goes back, pressed into the pillow under him, face red and contorted with the strain of not thrusting up into her and not going over. The angle she’s chosen, the slow grind of her groin against his, it’s not the sort of stimulation he wants and she knows it and he’s bearing it so beautifully. 

And she’s so close. Doing this to him brought her nearly up to the edge, the brute force grind against him is more than enough to bring her over the top. She’s deliciously full of him; never been much of a g-spot orgasmer but having a cock in her while she gets herself off is so good. 

“You’re doing so well,” she tells him, and his dark eyes open wide and he gives her a look of such complete happiness-- in this moment, to him, her praise is worth the agony of hanging on the edge and denying his pleasure, and that does it. She comes, clamping around him, making him whine. 

“Go ahead, sweetheart. You can move now. You can come.” 

He’s been hanging there so long it almost seems to be an effort now-- he thrusts his hips up into her desperately, and she bites down on a squeal as the aftershocks roll through her, biting the very edge of her lip to keep most of her composure as he finally finds his orgasm. He groans, a deep, animal sound out of his chest and pushes his hips, driving himself into her with a few fluttering, desperate thrusts and then going utterly limp. 

She reaches back for the TENS unit, quickly powering it off before the stimulation can overwhelm him.

She’s a bit ruined, she’d love to collapse on him, but there are things she absolutely must do first. ...First climb off, already missing the feeling of him snuggled up inside her, then carefully peel off his condom and toss it into the trash. As she uncuffs his wrists she can feel her own hands trembling with the receding rush of endorphins; her fingertips patter against his skin as she checks his wrists for irritation or chafing. 

“My hands are fine,” Henry promises her, and catches her hand in one of his own. “Darling, come here. You don’t have to fuss over me. Let me take that off of you-- you must be tired of it.” He undoes her bra with incredible dexterity for a man who’s been cuffed for the best part of an hour and doesn’t seem to have regained all his muscle tone post-orgasm. 

It’s a wonderful relief, though, and she lets herself melt onto him, half-heartedly tugging off her sweaty stockings. “I have to take the plug out,” she protests. 

“Leave it. It isn’t hurting anything.” 

“Mm, you have hidden depths, Henry Morgan. And I’m going to have a lot of fun plumbing them.” 

His eyes lid; he gives a delighted laugh. “I look forward to it. Oh, I do. But what I need most of all in the world just now is you in my arms.” 

“You romantic.” She bumps her nose against his and kisses him on his stubbled jaw. “I think I can do that for you.” 

“Molly Dawes, you have done _everything_ for me.” He smiles that sweet, helpless smile again. “Thank you.”


	6. Another productive conversation with etcetera

The phone goes off and she ignores it, wrapped in her blankets and comfortably insulated from the world and the reality of having to teach an 8 am seminar in the morning. Henry’s been gone for hours, called onto a scene in the early evening. He’s either sleeping at home, or still at work.

The phone continues to go off, rattling across her nightstand. It stops, but she doesn’t even have time to breathe a sigh of relief before it starts again, vibrating itself right off the edge.

She whines in protest and puts her pillow over her head.

It starts again.

She rolls over. Being awake is agony; moving is torture. She slumps her shoulder off the bed and claws for her phone.

“Hello?” 

“Hello, Molly.”

“Gnnnnn,” she moans into her pillow. “Nn. Did you have another nightmare, Adam?” 

“I haven’t slept yet.” 

He sounds significantly less smug than the last time they spoke. in fact, he sounds almost as miserable as she does. 

Almost. She can only muster so much sympathy. 

“Is something wrong?” An old musical kicks up in her sleep deprived brain. _Vhen I vas young and I vas cute and I vas in zer institute--_

“When I went to sleep yesterday evening, I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time in nearly a century.” 

“That must have been upsetting.” 

_Zey banged it in us like a drum; zer Corpus Hippocraticum_

“Don’t patronize me,” he snarls. “I haven’t been able to sleep in nearly twenty four hours. I’m nauseous with stress.” 

_If it's the best, go crack a chest, Or slice 'em open like a wurst,_ her brain yodels at her temptingly. No. She isn’t capable of abandoning Adam to his trauma just because he’s an abusive shitshow. _But first--  
Do no harm._

“Why did you call me, Adam?”

“Because you know why I’m afraid. You understand at least a part of this rage gnawing on my nerve ends.” He’s panting heavily. There’s a growl in his voice like an injured wolf; threatening, but not enough to rouse her from her half-awake torpor; she’s starting to get acclimatized to this and it’s very worrying. 

“It’s such a burden to be alone, Professor Dawes. But he and I, we have each other forever.” 

“You mentioned.” Patience running thin. Her energy to speak is draining out. 

Adam’s voice comes across in a rasp. “I can’t escape him any more than he can escape me. I could go to the other end of the world and still know that he’s breathing.”

Empathy drags her out of her comfy half-sleep in a way that fear didn’t. Scrunching up her face miserably, she forces herself to sit up. The effort is exhausting, leaves her feeling like her lungs have gotten too small. 

“I understand your anxiety,” she rasps, and bites her fist to stifle a jaw-cracking yawn. “But part of this is the sleep deprivation talking. These feelings will be easier to manage if you get some sleep, you know that.” 

“Help me,” he whispers. 

“Do you have a carpeted room in your house?” 

And she knows it’s a house, or at least a condo. She pieced together details from the last sleep deprived phone call, and she knows where-ever he is it’s a place he owns, has spent a long time in, though probably not all in one stretch, and it’s either not attached or so well sound-proofed that he isn’t concerned about nosy neighbors. 

“There’s a carpet in the living room.” 

“Good. All right.” War veteran. She knows techniques that have worked on war veterans with sleep paralysis… not that she knows which wars Adam’s actually been a combatant in, but some element of culture shock has to apply. 

“First, I need you to make your bed. Tight. Corners tucked in neatly. I’ll know.” That’s half a bluff, but she needs him to believe in her confidence and control. He grunts in acknowledgement, and she forces herself to stay awake through the white noise shuffle of cloth and squeaking springs. Fitted sheet. Sheet. Duvet. Pillows thumped and dropped onto bed. 

“Done.” 

“Good,” she says soothingly, as soothingly as three fucking am she has to be up in three hours god damn everything allows. “Now get together a second set of bedding. Something you can sleep on, and something to keep you warm. Take the thinnest pillow from your bed. Make a bedroll on the livingroom floor.”

“This is all you have?” he growls. 

“You’re the immortal with the decades of practice. You called me. Now go make your bedroll.” 

He drops the phone on some surface, loud enough to make her wince and jerk a bit more awake, and this time she hears nothing. He must be in the other room; there’s the creak of a cabinet to break the stillness, and more silence. 

She groans. Now she’s the one just a hair too keyed up to sleep. She’ll give him five minutes and then end this phone call.

Just as she’s about to cut him off, she hears heavy footsteps, and he snaps “Now what?” into the phone. 

“Lie down. We’re going to breathe together again. Put the phone by your ear. You need to hear me, and I don’t want to hear you complaining.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” says the catty bastard. She can hear him sneering. 

“Lie flat. Let your body adjust to the position; let it stretch. Shift your shoulders; let your spine find a neutral position. Splay your legs, feet shoulder-width, and extend your toes toward the far wall. Curl them. Tense your lower legs and your feet, tense them hard for three deep breaths. And slowly release for three deep breaths…”

He knows this routine inside and out, she’s certain, but all she can offer is to be the guiding voice. To take the control from him and leave him free to only react. It’s her area of specialization, after all. 

She slides down her headboard to lie flat and follows through the routine with him, tensing and relaxing, breathing along, and feels the exhaustion coming back to her. 

“Don’t worry about the phone. I’ll hang up when you’re finished. You don’t have to move; you don’t have to think. Last deep breath, and roll over onto your side. Let your body curl on itself. Arms and legs limp and heavy. Breathe in. And out. In. And out. Eyes closed. I’ll stay on the phone for ten more breaths and if you’re not feeling well enough yet speak out loud but don’t move. In… and out.” 

After ten deep breaths she goes quiet, but holds on for another full minute, just in case. 

Then she fumbles at the phone screen until it disconnects the call, rolls over into the fetal position, and abandons consciousness.


	7. A welcome interruption by Det. Jo Martinez

The weather is cold but the sun is warm through the window of the university coffee shop, and Molly sinks into the corner of the ancient couch and feels herself melting. Decisive footsteps, a slim body walking hard in sensible boots, makes her crack an eye. Detective Martinez plunks a latte in front of her and says, in her beautifully blunt way: “You look like crap.” 

“Late night.” Molly cups her hands gratefully around the paper cup. “Early class. The only good thing about 8 a.m. makeup sessions is that the students are only as awake as you are.” The exam time panic was well settled in, and attendance had been higher than normal, but even when fueled by adrenalin and espresso, 8 a.m. is a hard sell. 

“Do you actually like teaching?” Martinez makes a face, glances subtly around at the dead-eyed students slowly funneling into the shop and burrowing into their laptops and textbooks, and Molly giggles sleepily. 

“I do, actually. I like it less before noon, but I do love teaching.” And once the term papers start rolling in, due on Friday, not as much as she will again come January. “Bringing… clarity and nuance to these concepts that are so deeply embedded in history but so taboo. Sexuality has all these gradations and varieties but the public conversation is still stuck at this--” she waves a hand vaguely as the term slips out of her grasp. “--Between reality TV, vanilla monogamy, and 50 Shades. Big. Generalized ideas of what’s normal. You know. Sorry, I’m rambling.” 

“I know the feeling. The talking shop and the lack of sleep, I mean. I’ve been working nights on this really nasty case….” She takes a pull from her own take away cup, and folds down to sit next to Molly on the couch.

“The one on the news?” Two missing high-school students, a third found dead. Not really in her sphere, but upsetting anyway. 

“That’s the one. Can’t tell you about it but… late nights.” 

Molly toasts her with her latte, and Jo bumps her drink against it. 

“What brings you my way? Not that I’m not happy to have coffee with you for any occasion.” 

“I just wanted to.” Jo makes a small discontented noise, nose wrinkling as she tries to put words together. “Are things going okay with Henry?” 

“I’m not going to kiss and tell.” 

“I’m not looking for his penthouse secrets or anything. I just want to know if he seems okay.” 

“Is he not okay at work?” 

“He’s just being really, really _Henry_. He’s brilliant, he’s energetic, and sometimes he just looks like he’s going to panic for no reason. He almost got himself banned from working with the force last year because he was taking stupid risks and I just-- I don’t want to see him get hurt.” 

Molly knows the other side of that story; Henry told her, one late night, cuddled up in bed. He was taking risks to solve cases, leaning on his immortality to close cases, desperate to put things right. She can’t tell Jo any of this, and the details don’t really matter when the takeaway either way is that Henry isn’t doing all right. 

“He’s going through a rough patch,” she admits. 

“Is he at least talking to _you_ about it?” 

“Yeah.” 

“That makes one of us.” As adorable as Jo is when she’s disgruntled, Molly can’t say she’s pleased. 

She’s happy that Henry’s starting to open up to her-- however much his hand was forced-- but it’s not healthy to put all his trust in one person, not for her and definitely not for him. She takes a long drink of her latte, and considers what she can say, what won’t give away anything that’s not hers to tell.

“I wish he’d talk to you, too. He trusts you. He respects you so much-- he’s just one of those men who thinks he’s a failure if he asks for help.” 

“I know! It’s like relying on friends is something other people do, but not him. And it’s not like he looks down on me for the times I’ve needed a hand but he’s got that macho bullshit thing.” 

Molly hides a smile with her cup, because Jo Martinez strikes her as a woman with an astonishing amount of machismo herself, somehow comfortably settled alongside her straightforward femme presentation. 

Jo can sense the smile anyway, because she arches an eyebrow and gives the tiniest little huff of indignation, and Molly can't help but laugh into her drink. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says, quickly, but Jo rolls her eyes.

“I know,” she sighs. “I can’t help it, I know.”

“No, no,” Molly says, waving a hand. “You don’t have to explain.” Gorgeous woman, kind, competent, accomplished in a male-dominated field, strict views on justice and truth... she can see how it all falls into place.

“I bet you were wild sometimes growing up though,” she says, just bit of a tease, and taps at Jo’s foot with her own.

Jo ducks her head and laughs, low and embarrassed, and pushes her hair behind her ear. Molly lets it go. Not the right time or subject to pry, it seems. “I’ll talk to Henry,” she says, “remind him he has friends.” 

And see how receptive he is to encouragement to let Jo in on the details of his condition. She would never force him to confide in anyone-- but she can see how it would benefit it him to have someone else to trust, to feel open with. And it would take one more chip out of the foundation of fear and secrets Adam has tried so hard to isolate him with. “But, you didn’t just come here to talk about Henry?”

Jo’s big thoughtful eyes gleam then, a little guilty, a lot excited. “I have some time off coming up,” she says, casually, like Molly can’t see the sparkle the thought is giving her. “Use it or lose it, you know. And I thought-- well. I’ve never really travelled anywhere. You said once you’d been to Europe on your own?”

She had, years ago now, during her undergrad. One glorious year in Graz. “It was wonderful.” She toes her booties off and tucks her legs under her, knows she’s beaming. “Tell me where you want to go.”


	8. A practical study in power dynamics

Not sleeping together has never been a dealbreaker for Molly; she encourages intimacy that makes sense, and that includes people being able to get enough sleep in a comfortable environment. 

Personally, she likes having a warm body in the bed; she was happy to find out how good Henry was at sharing sleeping space. A little clingy-- even asleep he always seemed to like having a hand on her or a limb near her-- but not a smotherer, and not a blanket hog. A quiet dreamer, too. 

Usually. Tonight she wakes up, coming out of a shallow sleep to realize that the strange puffing noises she’d been hearing aren’t the nearby train tracks-- the ones she hadn’t lived near since she was nine-- and are Henry in the throes of a nightmare. He’s talking in his sleep; nothing coherent, barely recognizable as something other than a grunt, and has gone rigidly stiff. The hand that he had thrown out to find her sometime in the night is tensed and shaking. 

“Henry?” she mumbles, and prods him. “Henry. Henry!”

She tries to shake him by the shoulder and sleepily just winds up shoving him, hard. It does the trick, though-- the shallow, rhythmic sound of his breathing falters and then comes back in much deeper inhales and gusty exhales. His clawed hand relaxes, the fingers wiggling against the sheets as if to loosen them out. 

“Sweetheart, what happened?” 

“Nightmare,” he rasps. 

“It’s okay,” she soothes. “Come here, it’s okay.” 

He rolls over into her arms, settles with his head against her shoulder and his breath hot on her collarbone, knees tucked against her left calf. Almost a fetal position. 

She’s absolutely exhausted-- the immortals in her life are doing something awful to her sleep schedule-- but she’s made a commitment to herself to take care of him in the ways that she can. “Do you need some water?” 

“Maybe in a moment. Please stay.” 

She hums reassuringly, and sleepily reaches out to stroke his chest. She misses and finds his stomach first and shortly after that, his erection. 

“Oh god,” he says, miserably. 

“No, hush,” she mumbles. “It happens. You’re a doctor. You know it happens.” 

“But the dream.” 

“I know.” 

“It was-- terrible pleasure, this-- shame and pain, and--” 

“Come on, sweetheart. We’ll get you that water.” 

And she needs coffee. She pries herself out of bed -- and the gravity near her bed has to be at least double, it’s so hard to move away from it-- and then coaxes a skittish Henry out, wrapping him in one of her robes. It’s ridiculously short on him, but it covers him and it’s soft. 

“I shouldn’t have woken you up. I’m sorry--” 

“It’s okay. It happened. You didn’t mean it to. Now we’re having coffee.” She steers him out into the kitchen, sitting him down at the table before sitting down herself. 

“...You’re exhausted, aren’t you.” 

“Yes.” She nods, absolutely honestly. 

“I’ll make you that coffee. I’m... quite awake. Adrenaline, you know.” She nods. She does. 

He stands back up and kisses her softly on the head; he’s pulled his composure back around himself like the too-short robe, the few yards between the bedroom and the kitchen giving him some mental distance from whatever woke him up aroused and horrified. 

“Instant, sweetheart,” she instructs (...asks? it was meant to be a request but she’s not sure) as he starts to assemble the coffee things. “I can’t wait for the coffeemaker.” 

“Of course,” he says, something warm and deferential in his voice that grabs her by the chest and pulls. “May I start the coffeemaker once I’ve finished? You deserve something better to wash the taste away with.” 

“That would be wonderful,” she tells him, and he smiles warmly. “Make sure you make some for yourself if you want it.” Silly of her. She doesn’t have to give him permission to make himself coffee. 

She’s never wanted to give anyone permission to make themselves coffee before. 

Her electric kettle boils blessedly fast-- Henry mixes her a cup of instant coffee, frowning disapprovingly at it, sniffing it, glancing at her and quickly turning to her spice rack to tap cinnamon and cardamom into it before he mixes in the milk. 

“Thank you,” she breathes, and it almost smells like something drinkable when she takes a deep sniff of it. Oh, and it doesn’t taste like real coffee but it doesn’t taste like instant, either, and she almost burns her tongue taking a deep swallow. 

Henry just smiles, propping his chin on his hand and watching her drink. 

“Thank you. This was precisely what I needed-- it’s fading now.” He gives his head a little shake, to clear it. “It seemed so-- close, and profound at the time, but it was only a dream.” 

“Mm. Want to talk about it?” 

“Ah. No.” 

“You sure?” She pauses, cup to her lips. 

“Well, I. Died, in the dream. In a sexual setting. And I know that that disturbs you.” 

She nods, her exhausted heart giving a soft little pang. “In reality it does, very much. I don’t ever want to do that to you. But dreams are different. You don’t have to tell me-- but it would be okay if you wanted to. Promise.” 

He stirs in his seat, finding something fascinating in the kitchen to look at-- so fascinating that he can’t meet her eyes. 

“Was it me, sweetheart?” 

“No.” And then, resignedly: “Adam.” 

“Aah.” She nods. “You have a lot of emotions tangled up with him.” 

“The worst part wasn’t the blood,” he muses. “The wounds didn’t even hurt-- he shot me again, but the pain was fleeting, forgotten. Almost pleasant, as he went on. ..He shouldn’t have been able to, but somehow the pistol managed to fire and fire. But I simply laid there. I -- knew I shouldn’t welcome it but I liked it, felt released because I knew I could not die.

“He came to me, where I lay-- he pressed my face into the bloody earth. I felt as if I would sink into it, as if only he were solid. I wrapped my legs around him-” Henry frowns. “I… clung to him, and he buggered me in a pool of my own blood. I knew somehow that it was a dream, that I could stop it any moment, that I must stop it, but it felt so wonderful-- such pleasure, such a contentment, and I thought I felt myself slipping away with every moment-- my worth, my life, all sold for the filthy pleasure of his bullets and his cock in me. And still I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop.” 

His eyes flick up to hers, and she smiles gently at him and takes his hand. 

“I’ve had that dream, Henry. Everyone has. It doesn’t mean you gave up anything. 

“No. No. But in the moment, it felt--” 

“Humiliating? Filthy? Like you’d made a terrible mistake and you had to keep making it, and somehow that made you crave it even more?” 

“Yes,” Henry breathes. 

She rubs her thumb soothingly across his knuckles. “Yeah.” 

“You really have had this dream.” 

“It’s common. The details change but the feelings of arousal and helplessness are constant. It’s like the dream people have about being in a car with no brakes, just a mash of sensations our bodies are trying to make some sense out of. I’ll tell you about one of my dreams some time, if you want.” 

He leans forward until he can rest his head on their joined hands. 

“I think it would be a comfort. Not tonight, though, I want to chase the unpleasantness out of my brain before I go back to sleep-- want it all as far away as it can be. I’ve had dreams like this before, too, and lost hours of sleep to the phantoms of them.” 

With his head where it is, she can stroke his cheek and his knuckles with the same motion of her thumb. So she does. She can imagine him, alone, maybe trying not to wake Abe. He copes with so much alone, and she hates it-- hates that isolation is his first self protective instinct. He doesn’t like it, he’s such a sweet, social animal, but it’s been ground into him that he can’t involve anyone else. 

He misinterprets her silence: “I don’t think it will be like that tonight. You’ve broken the spell on me; you’ll be able to get to sleep soon without having to worry about me.” 

And that’s fair. It’s entirely fair. He didn’t ask for her to worry about him and give up her sleep to protect him. That was her choice, and she can’t assume that he wants it. 

Even if she wants him to want it. Even if she wants him to ask for her help and her protection first and not later after some accident tipped her off to there ever being a problem in the first place. 

“Henry?” she says, before she can stop herself. 

“Yes, darling?” 

Oh, well. “There’s something I think I want to ask you.” She pushes her hand up her face, combs it through her slept-on hair. “It’s the wrong time for this. We’re both too tired and you’ve had a hard night.” 

“Well. Tell me,” he encourages. “And I’ll hold my decision until a more sensible hour.” 

“I’ve been wondering about adding another …” Oh no she really is too tired to have this conversation, miraculously drinkable instant coffee or not. “Another dimension to our relationship. I’m incredibly happy with things as they are, Henry. Don’t think you have to agree to anything or change. It’s just a thought.” 

“Please. Go on.” He leans forward, searching her face. 

“...I’d like to… make the domination a day to day thing.” 

Nothing but questions on his face. But she’s started it and if she cuts herself off now he’ll only worry and have to guess. She has to put this together right; this isn’t a professional relationship that can end in a referral to a colleague and a polite goodbye. This could break her heart. 

“I want to take care of you, Henry. I want you to give up a little responsibility to me, to let me make some decisions for you. And with you. I’d like to be able to tell you to call me when you have nightmares like this and know you’re going to. I’d like it. If you would accept my help. And my orders. Reasonable ones. But every day.” 

She holds up a finger. “This is much less arbitrary that I’m making it sound. I picked a bad time to have this conversation.” 

“No.” Henry looks down at his hands, and when he looks up he’s smiling weakly. “I don’t believe it is. I’d been… immensely happy, following your instructions. I think I understand what you mean. You know how fiercely independent I’ve been, how little I allow anyone to help. It hasn’t always been that way. I relied on Abigail in much the same way, and in much the same way the choice was often taken out of my hands. I let her take it,” he muses. “We seemed a very proper marriage. I was not precisely subservient. But… I gave her many of my choices without saying as much, and she treated the gift with care. I was hers, in I think the way you’re asking me to be yours.” 

“Henry--” 

“I can’t tell you how free I have felt in your control. The weight that fell on me when I lost her that lifted, and I don’t mean to compare you, you are not the same woman, but I have not been so happy since--” 

“We’re not making the decision tonight,” she reminds him quickly, through a quickly tightening throat. 

“No. No, this is-- a question of dominance and service and it will take more deliberation. We can’t. Simply.” He shrugs articulately. 

“Exactly,” she agrees. Exactly. “And we can talk about what it will entail, and what you’re comfortable with, service doesn’t have to be an aspect--” 

“But can’t it?” Henry asks wistfully. “Could you look at me after a long day in the morgue, knowing my feet ache and I am tired of humanity and all the things they do to one another, and tell me to do some trivial thing for you? Ask me for coffee, set me on some task, and know that it gave me so much pleasure to put my own trouble aside in your cause?” 

“Ah,” she says, and that’s all she manages because she’s trying hard not to say anything stupid or just whimper at the perfectly clear image of him serving her with that sweet look on his face that makes her bones liquify.

“There’s one thing. If I gave you that trust, that responsibility, I would require-- a promise in return.” 

“Of course,” she whispers, barely unable to believe they’re having this conversation. 

“There will come a time,” he says, “when you appear to be much older than me. When our relationship will raise eyebrows in public. I may be mistaken for your nephew. Your son. When that time comes. Don’t leave me.” 

There’s something incredibly significant about this for him. She has, maybe, a quarter of the puzzles pieces she needs to understand why. But she doesn’t need them to understand that he means it. That he needs this. 

“If I am yours-- your responsibility and your servant-- please don’t abandon me. You needn’t be by me every hour, every day, but don’t go where I can’t follow you. Don’t hide from me. Even when you’re angry with me, when I am an inconvenience-- and that time will come.” He struggles visibly with his last words. “Even then. Look after me. 

“Abigail didn’t mean to abandon me. I kept her too close. I didn’t listen to her when she told me the truth, that we could not go on the way we were. She escaped to clear her head, only gone long enough to find a new answer for us. But before she could come home, to tell me how we could go on--” he shakes his head. “I can’t do it again. I can’t. I’ll behave as you think right in public, but don’t leave me behind.” 

She makes a little squeaking sound. It’s not the most confident way to start. She clears her throat, but the gravity of it all makes her giggle her way to the edge of very real tears. 

“Sorry, sweetheart. Sorry. Oh, no, I’m sorry.” She’s not laughing at him, he can’t think she’s laughing at him. 

“Here, now, if I’m not allowed to apologize neither are you, surely.” He smiles weakly and that’s it, the tears are loose and her cheeks are wet and everything is much too dramatic at three in the morning. 

She takes his elegant hands in hers and kisses the knuckles. “I’m going to make myself think about this for a while. All right? And we’re going to have this conversation when we’re awake and nobody’s crying.” 

“That seems… very wise. Oh dear.” A tear streaks down his cheek, but he’s still a lap behind her in the waterworks department. “Oh dear.” He giggles-- such a lovely deep voice, such a helpless little laugh, and it sets her off, and they cling to each other’s hands until Henry remembers the real coffee he has brewing and bolts up to serve them both. 

And Molly is going to make herself wait and they will talk _seriously_ about terms and nobody is running out for a ring or a collar tomorrow, absolutely not, but she loves him. 

She is absolutely in love with this man. 

 

She keeps thinking about terms, about negotiation. Even in the cold light of day and out of the emotional swamp of Henry’s nightmare the whole thing is so tempting. She’s never had a relationship with overt Ds tones; it felt too much like taking work home, and frankly she hadn’t met anyone quite worth that much effort. 

With Henry it feels so right that she has to keep checking herself. She feels giddy as a teenager on her first date and she has to make every decision carefully, clear-headedly, and not in some kind of hormonal fugue. 

But that’s not all that’s on her mind as the semester drags forward and her clients make their visits. She’s thinking about Henry’s nightmare, too, about his relationship with pain, shame, and pleasure. 

She’s thinking about the deep color of his eyes and the dark-honey tones of his voice when he asked her to take the shock rod to him. 

At least this decision is a lot less freighted-- deciding to give him a night of intense play is the easy part. The logistics are the only thing that’s difficult. 

 

She doesn’t have the hardware to suspend him properly at home, and she doesn’t want this to be a public outing. It feels a bit inappropriate to take him to work, but work is where she has the equipment to comfortably hang a hundred and sixty pound man from the ceiling, and work is also where they first met… 

She argues with herself for a long time and finally invites him to her office on a Friday evening, less than a week after his nightmare. 

He kisses her; lifts her, perches her on her desk and that’s a fantasy of hers, too. It would be easy to get lost in his kisses, to twine her legs around him, but that’s not what they’re here for. 

His hand slides under her blouse and finds leather. 

“Why, Miss Payne,” he murmurs, tugging the neckline of the blouse open to see the strap of one of her working outfits. “I had no idea it was such an occasion. I’m honoured.” 

“Cheeky,” she tells him, and kisses his chin. He grins impishly at her, and bends to kiss the strap reverently. She gives him one touch of lips to leather, and then crooks her finger under his chin to make him look up. “Do you know why we’re here tonight, Henry?” 

He shakes his head, his smile still mischievous. “I’m looking forward to finding out though.” 

“Any guesses?” 

“You had mentioned wanting a secretary. I thought I might be here to apply.” 

Her heart patters in her chest-- loving, earnest, playful boy. 

“Not tonight, Henry. I brought you here because of the suspension rig.” 

His eyes light up with pleasure. “Ah?” 

“Come with me.” She leads him through the curtain and into the working room, shedding her blouse and skirt as she goes. She feels his eyes roaming all over her, but she can hear it when he notices the toys-- his footsteps behind her falter, and stop. 

She looks over her shoulder, and finds him rapt on the small selection laid out on her workbench. 

“See something you like?” 

His eyes are fixed on the shock rod. He may not even have registered the flogger or the selection of open-mouth gags. 

She purses her lips sternly, executes a catwalk turn, and comes to take his chin again. His eyes snap to hers obediently as she angles his face toward her. “Henry. Do you see something you like.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” he breathes. 

“Recite every item on that table for me.” 

“Leather flogger. Cattle prod.” 

Her mouth quirks up, because he’s completely transparent in trying to hide his eagerness by not listing his fantasy toy first. 

“Jennings gag,” he goes on. “Horse bit. Ring gag. Some sort of small translucent ball, plastic, two inches in diameter.” She nods approvingly. 

“Is there anything on that table that you don’t want me to use tonight?” 

He shakes his head, then pauses. “What is the ball?” 

It’s a cat toy, actually, but she couldn’t have designed anything better suited to her specifications; she picks it up and shows it to him. 

“This is your safe word tonight,” she says, giving it a shake so that he can hear the jingle. She holds it out at arm’s length and lets it fall to the tiled floor-- there’s a sharper jingle, and it starts to flash in a riot of colors, the LED lights impossible to ignore in the dim room. “I’m going to tie you up and open your mouth. You won’t be able to speak. Then I’m going to put this ball in your hand.” She draws it out, each simple step, and watches his tongue come out to moisten his lips. “Then I’m going hurt you, Henry.”

He sucks in a breath, and lets it out slowly. 

“If you need my attention, you can shake it repeatedly. I’ll slow down and see what you need. If you need me to stop, drop it, and I will stop instantly. Nod if you understand.” 

He nods. 

“Anything you need to say before we start?” 

“Thank you,” he breathes. “If it’s acceptable, I’d prefer the rubber ring gag.” She suspected he might; the Jennings gag was a medical device first and he’s had a rough time on the wrong end of painful medical practices before, and horse bits are wonderful for humiliation but they sit far enough back that it might be uncomfortable. He likes the ring gag. It’s a safe old friend. 

“Of course, sweetheart.” She gives him a last, slow, lingering kiss, pushing him backwards until he’s standing under the main hook of the suspension rig. 

A single fingertap on his lips is all it takes to keep him silent as she undresses him; she moves him with verbal commands-- a murmured ‘arms up’ or a tap on the leg and a ‘lift’ and he complies like a well trained show animal, docile as she strips his clothes off of him and folds them one by one to rest on a low bench out of the way. Once his boxers are folded on top of the pile she attaches her favorite spreader bar to the dangling chain and cuffs him into it. 

“Open up,” she says, and he does; she slides the ring gag in behind his teeth, and cinches the leather strap behind his head. He nuzzles her hand as she’s testing the strap for fit, and she gives him a playful slap, all sound and no sting. 

“Did I say you could do that?” 

An instant, contrite headshake. 

“This isn’t about what you want,” she says, a brazen lie that isn’t a lie inside their scene. 

He nods. 

“Good boy.” She winches the chain up, pulling his arms above his head, notching it up just until the first signs of discomfort appear on his face. “Comfy?” 

He pauses, then nods. 

“Are you lying to me?” 

A slower nod. 

“That’s all right. You can lie to me. It won’t change anything.” She reaches into his gaping mouth and pets his tongue with her fingertip. “I’m going to do what I want with you.” She trails her spit-wet finger down his bottom lip, to his chin. “And you can’t stop me.” 

His chest heaves. 

She kisses his neck, and slips the signal ball into his hand. He grips it tight, keeping it carefully still. 

“You always think you have control, Henry.” She saunters around him, putting a little weight into each step so that the clack of her heels is inescapable, so that he can feel her presence even though he can’t see her. 

She lets him stew for a second as she picks up the flogger, running the tails over her fingers to check its pliancy. 

Then she turns back quietly and kisses his shoulder; it surprises him into a flinch. 

“You think you can talk your way out of situations. That you’ve planned for every eventuality, that somehow, some way, you’ll stay in charge. Because you have to, don’t you, Henry?” 

She draws her arm back and puts her arm into the first swing-- slow but forceful, and the heavy tails of the flogger thud against his back. He gasps, and his grip tightens on the ball in his hand but aside from the motion of his body swaying with the blow, it doesn’t shake. 

“You aren’t in control tonight. I am,” she says sweetly, and brings the flogger down heavy on his back again. They’re just warming up, really; barely worse than a slap on the back, an impact without sting. 

The next hit, only slightly harder, is on his round bottom-- he tenses involuntarily, then tries to relax as the next one falls, and then another. 

“You can’t escape this. You can’t stop it,” she continues, voice honey-sweet and so reasonable as she heats up his back. 

“And that’s okay.” 

She puts a bit of snap into the next swing, licks the leather tips of the flogger across his lower back; he likes impact more than cutting pain, but he’s going to need to be warmed up to a whole range of sensation before she brings out the prod. 

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” 

His incoherent mumble through the gag is a touch too defiant for her tastes, and she puts her weight into the next smack, tails almost whistling as they wrap over his buttocks and sting his hip. 

“I said ‘it hurts, doesn’t it’?” 

He garbles a noise and nods. 

“That’s right.” Another fast, hard swing. “I can do anything I want to you. And I’m going to, sweetheart.” 

He’s starting to pant, shaking his head fruitlessly to try to dislodge the drool that’s starting to run down from his opened mouth. The ring gag is a wonderful thing for loss of control, and the feeling of drooling on himself is working beautifully on Henry. He’s making little distressed whines, shifting his weight precariously in the little room the suspension gives him. 

She heats his back, his legs, his thighs, gets him pink and stripes him lightly red, murmuring degrading nothings to him as he drops deeper and deeper into his own pain and pleasure. 

He gets a half-hearted erection five minutes in-- his body obviously game but not entirely sure what the rules are. She ignores it completely and it wilts away of neglect. Henry barely seems to notice, grunting and rocking on his feet as she smacks his thighs and then skips back up to beat a little pink into his broad chest. 

His eyes have shut; he’s groaning intermittently, head lolling just a bit before he catches it, and it’s time to move on. 

She picks up the shock rod and removes the power pack, holding it in her left hand and the rod in her right. 

She runs the cool prongs over his cheek and his eyes open wide. 

“Even the smallest things are under my control,” she coos. “Even your mouth. Even your muscles. Even your fear, sweetheart.” 

She clicks the safety latch out from under the trigger, and lets him see it, her manicured finger curled over the trigger and the missing power pack hidden behind her wrist. She touches his face with the metal again, trails it down his chest and rests it over his sternum. 

He shudders convulsively and his eyes slam shut. 

She pulls the trigger so hard that he can hear the click, and he jolts in anticipation of the pain that doesn’t come. 

“Look,” she commands, and he does, shivering. She shows him the disconnected pack. 

“I control your pain,” she tells him firmly. “I will hurt you. I will not harm you. Nod for me.” 

He sags in his restraints, nodding, and even as he watches her snap the power pack in his eyes have lidded again. He’s dropping back into that place of contentment and pain. He’s shifting-- he must ache, there will be bruises from the flogger and his buttocks must be burning, but she can almost see him slipping under the surface of it. 

“This is going to sting,” she tells him, depressing the trigger of the shock rod, and touching it to the meat of his hip. 

He jerks, involuntarily-- she looks up sharply as the bell in his hand jingles, but as his body stills, it stills too. His eyes are wide again but he’s not looking at her-- he’s looking up, her very own statue of a saint in torment. 

She shocks his other hip, and he convulses, shakes in his chains, throws his head back. Sweat glitters in his hair. She chooses her targets carefully-- the firm swell of one thigh, then a pause to recover. A calf, very briefly, making his foot shake and stamp. The hip again, brief, careful applications of high voltage that make him shout breathy and incoherent through his gag.

He’s so beautiful this way it makes her heart hurt; he howls in pain but grips the signal ball tight, shudders but arches his back, offering his hip to her again, offers himself for abuse-- 

\--and she abuses him, takes him past the lines in the sand she would never cross with a patient: the highest voltage setting below the waist; risky low voltage shocks on the back of his shoulder blade that make him spasm in a way that scares her as badly as it must scare him, but she wants to give him this. There’s a last line of safety she will not cross but she drives them right up to it, to a place as cruel and as dangerous as her expertise can make safe. 

She applies one-two-three shocks down his right leg in such quick succession that he does a tortured little dance, foot stamping and shaking, and then she sets the prongs against him right on the fattest part of his buttock and he screams through the gag. 

Her heart is pounding; she stops, listens, hears his incoherent sobbing breaths and his soft whines. The signal ball is still in his hand, in a death grip that dents the plastic. 

She centers herself, and raises her empty hand to his empty hand, clasping it lightly in hers, squeezing twice. 

The response takes a long time coming-- she’s almost ready to hit the emergency release on the suspension chain when his fingers squeeze around hers, once and twice. He’s still with her. 

She’s panting as hard as he is, she realizes. He whines through the gag-- it might have a questioning note on the end. She squeezes his hand firmly one more time, and waits for his squeeze in response before she lets go. 

“My brave boy,” she says. “More?” 

He keens sadly, and it looks like such an effort to give a recognizable nod. 

“Yes. Good boys get just a little more.” 

She gives him time to breathe before she touches him lightly on the buttock again. Lets him breathe; the hip. Lets him breathe: the calf. Lighter touches, shorter touches, winding him slowly down. 

“All done,” she says, and he makes a sad little ‘uhhh’ through the ring gag, head drooping forward. 

She pops out the power pack on the shock prod, puts on the safety, puts it on her work bench-- she doesn’t let herself hurry, makes herself be careful and measured as she finally returns to him, ungags him and unlocks his cuffs and tugs him forward-- he falls onto her with a grunt, staggering, and she murmurs to him and guides him down to his knees, letting him slump forward onto her. 

“My brave sweetheart. What a good boy. What a good gift to give me your body,” she croons, and takes the signal ball from his limp fingers. He fumbles after it for a second until it seems to catch up with him that it’s all over. 

He moans softly, rubbing his face against her shoulder and pressing numb lips against her skin. His jaw and neck are soaked with saliva and she wipes the worst of it away with the back of her hand. 

“Lie forward, sweetheart. Oh, I know, your arms are sore. I’ll take care of you. Lean forward, there you go.” She eases him forward into a modified child’s pose, abused posterior slightly elevated, torso down, head resting on bent arms. “I’ll be right back, sweetheart, right back--” 

She pushes herself to her feet and beelines to the minifridge for a small bottle of water, grabbing a handful of flannel wipes and a clean blanket from the cabinet beside it. 

He’s starting to shiver when she kneels by his side again, and she gently wipes the sweat away with a flannel before she lays the blanket over him. She wipes his mouth and jaw tenderly, and rubs circulation back into his wrists and mobility back into his neck and shoulders. 

“I’ve got some water when you’re ready,” she murmurs, and he mumbles at her. “Yes, I know. But you’ll feel so much better when you’re rehydrated.” 

“I feel better now,” he rasps, and reaches up unsteadily to take her hand from his shoulder, tugging it down to kiss it. “Did I do well?” 

“Oh, sweetheart. Perfect.” She wraps an arm over him and snuggles up, both of them sitting uncomfortable on the clean tile floor. “You’re perfect.”


	9. A further conversation with etcetera

_Unknown Number_ says her phone, vibrating on the table next to her stack of unmarked undergraduate midterms. She stares at it. It’s only seven thirty. It could be anyone. It vibrates again, rattling against the tabletop. _Unknown Number_. That’s the problem with giving out her number and telling people they can call at anytime: sometimes they do. 

It’s not even past midnight. Really, that puts the odds against it being him in her favour.

She grabs it on its last ring. “Hello?”

“Hello, Molly.”

Damn. “Adam. Isn’t it a bit early for bed?”

“Not where I am,” he says, and she hears the faint creak of a mattress. She only realises her hand has been clenched into a fist around her marking pen when she lets it go. She shouldn’t be relieved that he’s probably halfway around the world. She shouldn’t trust him that he is. But there’s security in that, however false, and she can breathe a little easier.

“Is this a good time?”

She can’t tell if he’s mocking her or genuinely being considerate. As considerate as he can be, at least. “It’s not 3 am,” she says. “Can I do something for you, Adam?”

“Is he there?” There’s nothing subtle about the question. He might be trying to adopt his usual bland indifference, but he’s far from achieving it, the words breathy with too much want and she wonders if he meant to ask it at all.

“No.” He’s not. She’s here with her stack of midterms she wants to have back to the students on Monday; Henry’s out living those large parts of his life that are separate from hers. She wonders if Adam’s disappointed or relieved.

“Do you ache for him?” Adam says, the sound muffled and crackling; she can picture him, pressing the phone to his face.

“Are you having trouble sleeping?”

He’s quiet for a long moment, half-strangled breathing fading, the line going smoother. “I dream about him,” he says. “I think about him. I don’t know if I’m thinking or dreaming sometimes. Did I want to imagine him reaching into my trousers on the metro, trapping me against the wall, or was it a nightmare? Could I move, or did I chose to stand there and let him?”

“Did you have a nightmare tonight?”

“I haven’t slept yet.” He breathes out heavily. “I need to know where he is.” She wonders then if he left New York to leave Henry-- she sits up a little straighter in her seat. That could be good. If he’s trying to distance himself...

“I ache for him,” he says. “He’s mine. You wouldn’t understand. You’re not good enough for him, I hate that he touches you. What does he let you do to him? Do you hurt him?” He’s almost hissing, breathless, his words starting to follow too fast on each other. “Tell me.”

“Adam, I will not discuss my relationship with Henry with you.”

“He’s not yours!” The speaker on her phone cuts in and out when he shouts, and she jerks it away from her ear. She wonder where he is-- a hotel? A house? How thin are the walls? “You couldn’t possibly-- we are forever. There is only us. You don’t know what it’s like to be alone. Not for two thousand years. And now I know he’s there. We are made to suffer this together.”

“You’ve mentioned this,” she says, and tries not to focus on imagining all the ways Adam could make Henry suffer. The idea that he might decide to paralyze Henry in return for his months in hospital finds the corners of her nightmares. “You’ve left New York. Are you taking some time from him?”

“I’ve had two millennia without him!” Adam hisses, voice sharp but low this time. Maybe wherever he is he doesn’t want to shout that. Maybe he just doesn’t want to shout. “I knew about him for thirty years before I found him. Most of your fleeting little lifetime. I knew he was there but I couldn’t find him, couldn’t touch him, couldn’t show him he wasn’t alone, that we belonged together.”

Thirty years to obsess over an idea, Molly doesn’t say because she’s both highly trained and not an idiot. Thirty years to turn him into an object, a possession that didn’t respond the way you wanted him to. “You know you’re both going to be there in the future. You know he’s not going anywhere. Why not give both of you some time apart, to think reasonably about that fact that there is someone else who shares your condition.”

“He wants to die.” Adam laughs, still a little too manic for her liking. “He’s such a child still. But he’s so scared. He hates dying, fears it every time. But still he’s trying so hard to find a way. Did you know that? Your sweet lover would kill himself and leave you and his son behind if he could.”

She does know that. At least she knows he’s searching for a way, has spent years cataloguing everything he knows about his immortality, and how he might to treat it. “What about you? Are you looking for a way to die?”

“It didn’t work,” he says bluntly. “Henry lived. There would be no point in trying it on myself.” The pugio, she remembers. Henry had told her. She hadn’t focused on those details before; Henry had lived, he’d incapacitated Adam, pretended his fears and his shame didn’t exist, and come to her. There had been other things to think about. 

“I was wrong, of course,” Adam says, almost as an afterthought. “It was too simple. The weapons failed to kill us initially-- why would they be successful a second time? But then I realized. Why _would_ our own weapons kill us? We have to kill each other.” There’s something cracking under his voice now, like the earth shaking and splitting. Molly sits very still and listens very hard. She might not like what she’s hearing, but this is about understanding Adam. 

“In the manner we were killed,” he continues on, blithely. “I need to stab him with my pugio, where I was stabbed. He needs to shoot me with his flintlock. In the heart. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“What about that makes sense to you?” she asks, and just manages to shave off the disbelief, to keep it neutral. 

“Our lives our destined to come together,” he says, and there it is, that bland, unaffected Adam. “You still don’t see. I lie awake and wonder about how many times we’ve crossed paths without knowing. You can’t give him what I can. I want to be every anonymous lover he's had. I was a sailor from some time, when his father owned the shipping business. Was he one of the faceless men in the London dockyards, looking for a rough ride in the dark? Did he _fuck_ me in a stinking Victorian alley? Has he been the mouth on the other side of a toilet wall? Did I leave him choking on his knees on the floor of club toilet? Do you imagine him that way, Molly? Can you see that he’s been mine before you were even born? Don’t touch him--”

“Adam,” she says, sharply enough to cut him off. “This isn’t about jealousy. This is about how you two react and behave around each other. I will not have you continue the way you are. You are damaging each other, and you are a threat to everyone around you. I would tie the ropes around his wrists for you myself if he wanted it and I thought I could trust you within ten miles of him, do _you_ understand?”

She can hear the clock on her kitchen wall ticking. She counts along with it for twenty beats, breathing deeply. Then she says: “Why did you call me tonight, Adam?”

“I hate him.”

“Yes.”

“I need him.”

“Why did you call me, Adam.”

“Is he there?”

“No.”

“Do you tell him I call?”

“Yes.”

“Does he hate me?”

“What do you think?” It’s a struggle, but she grips the bridge of her nose and says it as reasonably as she can.

“I killed his wife.” 

“I know.” She knew. She’d cried with Henry, and cried alone after, and had really, truly wondered if she was making the right choice for herself with him. But Adam wasn’t Henry’s fault. His immortality wasn’t Henry’s fault. He was a sweet, generous man. “Why did you call me, Adam?”

“Perhaps I wanted a cup of tea.”

She sighs, tips her head back and stares up at the ceiling while she considers. “Henry is a good man, Adam. He helps people, and he looks for the best in them. I think you’ve spent too long thinking about Henry, and not enough time thinking about other people.”

“What are you saying,” he says, and she can just see the sneer. “That we need a break? I should see other immortals?”

“I’m saying that you should consider pursuing other interests. Something simple. Volunteer at a drop-in centre, get children somewhere safe to sleep. You’ve been--” she almost says a psychotherapist, but no, no, hell no, she does not need to inflict Adam on some poor unsuspecting person. “--around for a long time. Have you documented it? You have the only account of centuries of lived history.” 

It’s amazing, actually, and reminds her that she really needs to sit Henry down and work out a schedule with him. One of her former students is doing her Masters thesis on merchant navy ship surgery practices during the Napoleonic Wars, if only there was some way to get Henry’s information to her without putting him at risk....

“Maybe you’ll find something worth saying,” she says. “You have the time.” 

Then she closes the door as firmly as she can. “Are you lying down?” 

“Yes,” he says, shortly. “I’ve made sure the linens are fresh, while you’re prying.” 

The resentment pours through the phone. But she can hear the relief. Is he letting her hear it? Can he help it? 

She knows better than to think she’s ever going to hear gratitude from him, but the short, sullen responses after his monologue are almost the same thing. Maybe someday he’ll even be able to admit he’s having trouble sleeping before the sexually threatening speeches. Poor mixed up sadist.

“Good. Do you remember our breathing exercise? ...Good.”


	10. The limits of conversation

  
`To: DawesM@NYCTherapeutics.com`  
`From: LFarber@NYP.org`  
`Subj: Last night’s discussion `

`Professor Dawes,`

`I’ll be back in town soon and would like to meet with you to discuss the advice you gave me last night. Please advise if you will be available for a meeting after your classes on Monday afternoon. `

`Lewis A. Farber  
`

It pings into her Inbox on Saturday afternoon, and she stares at it for a long time with her head propped on her chin. It’s so short and it says so much. Part of what it says is the New York Presbyterian Hospital sysadmin has been very bad about purging the email access of supposedly dead counselors. 

He’s given her a full day and a half to respond: this isn’t a late night emergency call. It’s not outside of his abilities to be polite, she knows that, she’s seen him wield bland inoffensiveness like a weapon, but it’s not immediately obvious why he’s being polite _now_ , to her. Oddly formal, oddly official, using one of his aliases but at least alluding to his preferred identity. 

Hmm. 

She unplugs her phone, interrupting its synch with her computer, and dials Henry. 

“Abe Morgan,” a cheerful voice answers, and she smiles. “Abe’s Antiques.” 

“Hello, Abe. It’s Molly Dawes.” 

“Hey! Long time no hear. Henry was making noises about getting you over to dinner one of these days, what ever happened to that?” 

“Apparently he was ready to let me meet his roommate, but he’s not sure if I’m worth taking home to his son,” she chuckles. “I am sorry I never got to that dinner but I don’t mind taking it at his pace. I can understand that he needs a little bit of an adjustment period.” 

“Ah, geeze, that sounds like him. He’s lucky you’re the understanding type.” 

“Well, he’s proved he’s worth it. ...Is he in?” 

“Yeah, I think so. I’ll go grab him. Don’t you be a stranger, okay? If he doesn’t get over it soon pop a little sense into him. Just don’t tell me about it,” he adds, in a tone so delightfully reminiscent of every young man who never wanted to acknowledge his parents’ sex life but coming from such a gruff old curmudgeon that she has to laugh.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” she promises, smiling despite the seriousness of the call, and settles back to wait for Henry. 

She hears footsteps pounding up a flight of wooden stairs, and the phone clattering as Henry picks up the receiver. “Molly?” 

“Hello, sweetheart. Do you have a second to talk?” 

“Of course. What’s wrong?” 

Of course he’s picked up the slight tension. She doesn’t want to alarm him, she just wants to keep him in the loop, she reminds herself. 

“Adam just emailed me. He wants to meet me.” 

“Molly, you can’t--” 

“I don’t think he wants to hurt me. Not at this meeting,” she reassures him. “He’s offering me the choice of when and where. I don’t think this is an overt power play.” 

“And he might be proving that he can get to me any time and any place,” Henry frets. “If something happened to you, if something happened because of me--” 

“He’s had his chance before. He’d have a chance anyway. Henry, I think I should meet with him. I’d rather know where he is and what he wants than have to wonder.” 

“I don’t know how to keep you safe,” he sighs. She can just see him, his tense shoulders and distressed face. 

“I’ll tell you when and where, sweetheart. I’ll call you after a half an hour, and I’ll have the emergency call app open on my phone the whole time.” 

“Please be careful. Please.” 

“I will. I promise.” She strokes the back of her phone unconsciously, trying to send comfort across the connection. “I’ll take every precaution.” 

It’s a perfect example of why therapists try to avoid dual relationships-- the strain between Henry’s fear and the reasonable care and privacy she has to extend to Adam because she will not violate her ethics even for immortal murderous stalkers or else why even have ethics. 

She holds back a frustrated growl with every fiber of her strength, says her goodbyes to Henry sweetly, hangs up, and then indulges in a little therapeutic profanity.

Okay. 

 

  
`To: LFarber@NYP.org`  
`From: DawesM@NYCTherapeutics.com`  
`Subj: Re: Last night’s discussion`

`I’m free at 3:30. I’ve reserved a room in the LGBT student center. Directions enclosed.`

`Dawes  
`

* * *

Molly loves all the quiet, pleasant places the university has set aside for exhausted students to come rest in safety, but the LGBT center is her favorite. The administration wasn’t sure what best practices were when they inaugurated the place in the early 90’s, and the original founders were given more leeway than most to make the place cozy and playful. There are rainbow suncatchers in the window that have faded to pastel with the years, movie posters scattered over the walls and a gloriously dragged out Ken doll astride a model of the bus _Priscilla_ in pride of place on one of the bookshelves. 

The bookshelves had been organized once, maybe twenty years ago, but are now a clutter of erotica, queer scifi, YA fiction, historical women-in-bondage and gay tragedy books, scholarly studies, and queer poetry. Her graduate thesis is on one of those shelves, probably stacked with other binders and writings by other ambitious students. 

She pulled all nighters on that couch as an undergrad, cried into these sequined throw pillows in grad school and now she volunteers as a counselor here, in her capacity as ‘Molly Dawes, expert in having a rough time coming to terms with her bisexuality while being paranoid about reinforcing harmful stereotypes’ instead of ‘Molly Dawes, expert in paraphilia’. Oh, the memories aren’t all rosy and the perennial argument that a woman who’s dating a man has no right to call herself queer and she should be excused from counseling duty until such time as she has a certified gold star exclusive female sex partner, etcetera, is due to sprout again in the next few months, once the spring semester has wrapped up and the summer restlessness settled in, but taken as a whole this little space is a comfortable one for her. 

It’s neutral territory that feels safe, and she hopes she’s not inviting disaster by bringing Adam here. 

It’s twenty after: she pours herself a cup of the comfortingly mediocre free coffee and settles into one of the giant beanbag chairs to wait.

She isn’t left waiting long. Adam slips in five minutes early, taking in the decor with a lofted eyebrow and mixed amusement and bemusement. His eyes land on Molly, lounging in the beanbag chair, and she meets his gaze fearlessly. 

Sometimes she has to accept helplessness in order to work with it. She’s accepted that Adam is … centuries older than her, however theoretical that still feels to her, that he has more resources, that he has a physical advantage over her she can’t overcome. Her seat is half nostalgic comfort and half an acknowledgement: he has the upper hand, and she isn’t in denial. 

They stay eyes-locked for a little too long-- three seconds, four, five. 

Adam extends a hand, like a gentleman. 

She takes it, as if she can trust him. 

“Thank you,” she says, once she’s levered herself upright. He’s deceptively solid; doesn’t look big but didn’t sway an inch as he pulled her to her feet. “The room is free if you’d like to start our meeting early. Or would you like some coffee? Tea?” 

“No, thank you.” 

It’s all so professional and friendly that she has to hide a smile at the mundane what-seems stretched tight over the dangerous what-is-- and even so, Adam sees it in her face, and flashes her a toothy, amused grimace that makes her smile widen. 

“Well then, Doctor Farber. Right this way.” 

Even the counseling rooms weren’t immune to the aggressively casual decorating scheme; there are two armless chairs tucked under a small circular writing table, two inflatable chairs, and a decorative footstool in the shape of a giant high heel. 

Molly settles into one of the inflatable chairs, vinyl squeaking as she gets comfortable. Adam perches regally on the giant high heel. 

“Thank you for agreeing to see me.” 

“Thank you for asking at a reasonable hour.” 

“How many people know exactly where you are right now, and are ready to phone the police if you’re even a moment late to a pre-arranged contact call?” 

“More than two. Less than ten.” She takes out her phone and activates the panic app, holding it up to show him. It’s in threat mode: if her thumb slides off the central button and she doesn’t enter a pin within thirty seconds, it will automatically dial 911. 

“Very sensible of you. It wouldn’t stop me, but it’s sensible.” 

“I know what you’re capable of,” she reminds him. “Henry may not understand completely how difficult it was to hunt him down and spy on him the way you did, but I do.” 

“Yes. You do. And here you are baring your extremely attractive neck. It’s… an admirable approach to forces you can’t change.” He grimaces again. It’s much less off-putting than his bland, friendly smile. “An intriguing woman. No wonder you caught Henry’s interest.” 

“Don’t start,” she says pleasantly. 

He grimaces at her. “It’s unbecoming. I know. I... can’t help myself around him.”

“Is that why you wanted to see me?”

“No.” He scowls. “In part.”

She waits for him to talk. It’s an old trick, leaving silence for someone else to fill. Adam can’t be unaware of it, but as the quiet stretches, the hum of the fluorescent lights growing louder, the sound of someone walking by in the hall outside, he narrows his eyes and says flatly:

“I am not... unaware. That my current mental state is. Lacking.” He stares at her for another moment, aggressively calculating. “I have, in fact, been certified to practice psychiatric medicine many times. And Henry has been a soldier, but that doesn’t make me a doctor any more than it makes him a Praetorian guard. But I can recognise. Disorder. When I’m living it.”

“That’s good,” she says. “Why don’t you tell me about that.”

“Ha. Yes.” He offers up a sneer, his lips thin and sharp. “Dissociation. From day to day life, from the worth of other people. Understandable, perhaps. But not sustainable. At least not with any goals for... emotional. Stability. Continued coexistence with-- this.” He waves a hand, like the vinyl chairs and high heel stool and rainbow sticker in the corner of the door mean anything beyond what they are. “And the world is changing. The pace is considerable. If I blink, everyone will be speaking a language I have never heard. People die so quickly. I am already obsolete. And, yes. Fixation. On the one individual who might understand. Who matters.”

He glances down, takes a breath that sounds like it’s tearing something, and rubs his thumb over some deeply scratched in graffiti on the writing table. Sam was here in ‘07. She hopes wherever Sam is now, their memories of this room are good ones. “It is not going well.”

He looks up; holds her gaze. 

“You’ve murdered him three times,” she points out. He nods. “You’ve tormented him and put him in fear for the safety of his friends and family. You represented such a threat that his wife chose suicide over letting you coerce her into revealing him. You’ve taken his stability from him again and again. You abused his trust.”

“I want to hurt him,” Adam says. “I want to _disappear_ in him, I want to consume him. This is forever. But it, too, may not be. Sustainable. You have not been... unhelpful, this past year.”

“Thank you. Is that what you want from me?”

“I want what all of your clients want, Professor Dawes. I want you to help me.” 

She sits back in her inflatable chair, vinyl squeaking, and knows that crossing her legs is a tell. She’s unsure of this and on her guard and she’s showing it, so she might as well let it show. God knows they could use a little more honesty between them. 

“You haven’t always respected the boundaries of a therapeutic relationship, ‘Doctor Farber’.” You know. Because that time you pretended to be Henry’s counselor and coerced him into killing a man in self-defense. “I’ll need to be able to trust you. And you’ll need to be able to trust me, too. How can we do that?” 

“I think… we can believe in one another’s self interest. You don’t want me to harm him. I don’t want an eternity with quite this many sleepless nights. The game, the conflict, is significantly less satisfying than I thought it would be.” 

Was it more satisfying, she wonders, before Henry actually started to fight back. 

They lock eyes, and it’s-- it’s-- 

Call it a truce of wills, because it isn’t quite a battle. 

“Give me a hand up?” she asks mildly. His seat is still easier to get off of even if it is a black and neon pink high heel. He stands, extends a hand to her again, and once again lifts her effortlessly up to her feet. He doesn’t make a grab at her left hand, which is pressed against her hip, thumb still on the button of the emergency call app. 

Heels or no heels he’s got six inches on her. She looks up with all the reasonable fear of a woman in a small space with a serial killer, and without an ounce of surrender. He looks back, with the confidence of a serial killer and the wariness of someone who isn’t entirely sure what’s about to happen and isn’t happy about not knowing. 

She squeezes his hand in hers, as tight as she can; he squeezes back harder. Macho bullshit, she remembers Jo saying, suddenly, and maybe it is. Look, her hand in his conveys. Look, I know you’re stronger and that will not stop me from meeting you on equal terms. 

“My name is Molly Dawes, but if you’re in session with me, you will call me Miss Payne. I am a certified domination therapist. I will hurt you, but I will not harm you. I will not aid, abet, or shelter you in illegal activities but I will protect your secrets to the absolute limit of my abilities. I’ll help you, if you let me.” 

He dips his chin, the slightest acknowledgement possible. It feels as if she’s already made an extremely risky commitment somehow. 

“My name was not always Adam, but it is the closest thing I have to a true identity. My story… is a very, very long one.”


End file.
